Fixing the little things in Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Fixing the little things in Gmail

gmailblog.blogspot.com

57 pointsabraham31 comments

They should fix the speed.

Hehe, I hope they don't, we're already fixing that with our desktop client, BetterInbox

Details? :)

We're making a cross-platform desktop client in C++ / Qt.

We access Gmail over IMAP, and we specifically optimize for their servers (ie: we don't bother supporting the full range of the IMAP protocol, and we take advantage of Gmail specificities)

This allows the client to feel fast, even though actions that have to sync with Gmail, like deleting or archiving something aren't really faster or slower than with the web interface. But they happen in the background, so it feels snappier.

We will be releasing a private alpha in a few days. It's still very early, though. You can read / delete / archive / reply to emails in your inbox, and that's all for the moment.

Drop me a mail if you want to try it out, or sign-up for the beta at http://betterinbox.com (The beta will be released later, in a few months I think)

I didn't think I'd signed up when using that form, since it doesn't appear to have any visual feedback. A "Confirmation email sent!" would be nice. :)

That said, I can't wait to see what you come up with!

Thanks for the feedback, you're right.

This whole sign-up page seriously needs some love.

Why desktop rather than web?

Because that's what gives us an edge to compete with Gmail.

We can be faster than gmail.com because we're a desktop app. Trying to compete with gmail.com as a webmail would be way harder.

In that case, aren't you really competing with Outlook?

Yes, that's how we pitch it: "We're making an Outlook competitor for Gmail".

But gmail.com is a much bigger competitor for us than Outlook, since that's what most people use. Our main target are people using gmail.com.

I preferred when the refresh button was a link. It made sense because all of the buttons are actions to be performed (POST) whereas the refresh link simply checks for new emails (GET).

I suspect this distinction isn't clear to most people, who see "check for new emails" as an action to be performed.

I've used Gmail for 7 years and never noticed or desired a Refresh button nor link. I've always just clicked the logo or Inbox in the left menu.

I'm glad to see there's some forward motion on Gmail; it's seemed like development stalled out a year or so ago. However, it's a bit depressing. If it takes this long to get around to fixing the small things, how long is it going to take the fix the big things?

Gmail's still the best web-based email client I've seen, but at this rate not for long. There's a big honking opportunity here for someone to move in and eat Google's lunch.

> If it takes this long to get around to fixing the small things, how long is it going to take the fix the big things?

Generally the small things don't get fixed because the big things are getting fixed.

Gmail has been regularly releasing new features and new labs over the past year. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/

Strange that the "refresh" button does not provide any visual feedback if there are no new messages. Not good. Even refreshing inbox by clicking on "Inbox" on the left briefly shows a "loading" message.

I see the same "loading" message briefly at the top when pressing the new Refresh button.

You can also get the same behavior if you turn keyboard shortcuts on with either "u" (to refresh current view) or "gi" (to go back to the inbox).

I just suggested to them that if I send an email and it bounces, that I be asked if I want to remove that email address from my contacts.

I have a lot of non-working email addresses in my contacts, and it is a PITA to clean them up.

Sad to see they didn't fix my "one thing": nothing should take more than ten seconds.

I'd really like to see them improve search speed.

It's the one advantage, in my opinion, that desktop outlook has over gmail.

Need a better way do inline quoting. Gmail insists on top-posting even when I select the part I want to reply to, it's several extra steps to cite and trim properly, especially if you want to reply to more than one part of a message.

The most useful thing for me out of that list is "Shift + ?" shortcut. For too long I had to open another tab, open Google, and type in 'Gmail shortcuts'...

That has existed for years.

I really happy to see the option to disable auto-saving contacts. Now what about fixed-width fonts in plaintext messages? :-)

Came here to mention the same thing. It is incredibly surprising to see that they've not improved the usability of plain text after all these years. Arial is still the default font both for composing and reading.

Now, what I'd also really love to see is a 80 character width guide while composing plain text emails. That may be too nerdy though, but I'd just love to get as close to my usual Vim/mutt config as possible.

Maybe they'll at least get a lab feature out for us plain text users. At least let us customize our plain text font choices. For now, there are a few Chrome extensions that fix this issue.

What I'd like is a preview window on the main page, so I can select an email and see the contents.

Did I really just waste time reading this?

Certainly did if you don't use gmail--- maybe not if you do :)

I think he did waste his time. So did I. I use Gmail. I was so hoping for a lot of performance fixes but no, they are taking care of creating a Refresh button instead of a link. :|

It does say, "Fixing the little things in Gmail".

I have to give you a +1 for that and wish I could give -1 to myself.

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