Let's be honest with ourselves, the contacts manager in
Gmail used to look and act like it was made in 1994. Clunky, inflexible, and pretty intensive on manual labor, it was the sort of thing you just didn't bother to fiddle with too much. That plight may be at an end now, however, as Google has upgraded the whole experience to better align it with the rest of its email service. Newly added features include keyboard shortcuts, custom labels, sorting by last name, and autosave, which together with a UI realignment make your list of buddies far easier to both navigate and alter. Along with this Contacts update, Google is rolling out a few subtle nips and tucks to the overall Gmail interface, the biggest of which is the commitment of the top-left corner to a trifecta of items: Mail, Contacts, and Tasks. Oh, and some header optimizations have resulted in the top message in your inbox now appearing a whole
16 pixels higher. Can't say Google is neglecting the details.
posted August 11th 2010 4:54AM
Aweesummm
@viper24
its good, but are you just trying to get highest ranked???
@viper24 Awaiting one word review of my Engadget overhaul, Viper24: http://userstyles.org/styles/31268
@voltaek whilst substantially cleaner it also removes the adverts which are what pay to keep engadget alive. So sorry but I'll have to pass.
@voltaek
That's awesome, who doesn't like a sleeker, cleaner and ad-free page? It's why we have all the ad-blockers and ad-free plugins. Even my N1 is ad-free! Thanks for this, installing it now.
@voltaek Sweetnesssssss
About time to, love gmail
@chrisnic0 I'm going to, use gmail.
@chrisnic0
Now if they would just up the photo resolution of contacts. Currently, contact photos look terrible when you get a call on a nice high-rez android phone.
@steel Ha, I thought this was a glitch in the Touchwiz skin of my phone! It really looks embarrasing, even on my SE C510 those pictures looked way better.
Glad your awake Vlad. Was wondering when someone was going to post this.
i hope they include this in Google Apps soon. It looks a lot better and would actually make me want to switch over to using it full time.
I'll be happy when they finally fix the file size limit on contact images, so my phone contacts don't look like shit.
@Winkins I was just thinking that. It seems like such an easy thing to do.
@omatzyo Yeah, change a single line of code and make thousands happy.
@Winkins Really grinds my gears
Outstanding!
It's buggy for me. The receive date of the email gets cut off from the edge. This is because I don't use the English version and the month isn't abbreviated (June - > Jun). Doesn't make the service useless of course, but in some manner, some details are being neglected.
It's amazing Gmail has been around 6 years and beyond some minor tweaks like this the interface looks like the same piece of shit it did when it first launched.
@Raffi256 In what way is the interface a POS?
@Raffi256
And yet for the 6th year in a row it's still the best Internet mail all things considered.
@Raffi256
Actually, I think it's probably gotten worse. This is, in my opinion, what happens when you have feature explosion with little know-how on the user interface/implementation side of things....
Why must an email interface suck so much?
@Raffi256 You might as well criticize the "piece of shit" Google search home page that has been around for as long as Google has existed.
Truth is, the minimalistic layout of Gmail (and Google search) works well. I'm glad they've kept it that way, and I'm sure they are intent on keeping it that way as well.
Productivity is terrible on it, it doesn't even have a preview/reading pane. And it looks and feels like a web page, not an application. It's barely a step up from Squirrelmail.
For personal mail its fine really, but I can't believe people use this in business. You can't even sort by anything other than the date.
@mm
For search the minimalism is fine, but email it comes at the expense of productivity. And gmail's UI is hardly simply, it's just full of half-baked stuff like their attempt at drag-and-drop support (which is barely discoverable) and navigation. I can't believe they push this thing for enterprise.
@Raffi256 If you install the appropriate lab you can right click on a mail for a preview...
@Raffi256 Having used Squirrelmail and a bunch of other webmail products (Vircom's, BlueTie's, RoundCube's, and several others, as well as the usual Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) I have a hard time understanding your opinion.
If there is another product that offers the power and flexibility of labels, I have not seen it. With gmail, you can even have nested labels if you want. I admit I haven't tried every single mail client or webmail setup, but not a single one that I know of has come close to this quality of organization.
Previews are easily enabled if you take a moment to put a check in the checkbox.
Threaded conversations are also missing from most/all of the e-mail setups I have tried.
I'm not trying to be insulting, I'm just not really understanding where you are coming from.
Nice. But I'm still missing the ability to Create Filters using my Contact Groups. Gah.
I don't see any difference in my Google Apps account.
I'll have to wait another 6 months I guess.
looks & works great, thx google
Wow. Upon closer look this looks a lot like Apple's Contact application. The OS X kind. I'll verify tomorrow and place a side by side comparisson pic. Good night.
@HighestRanked1 I think this is just a case of using the most obvious interface. It's not as if OSX's address book has a particularly revolutionary or notable interface in the first place.
Interesting, possibly influenced by current Google Me development? Contacts are kind of a big deal
@Raffi256
As a professional I have used both Outlook (2003 & 2007) and GMail for email for many years. GMail is a far superior solution to email. Productivity increases many times with GMail leaving you free to actually do work rather than trawling through your emails organising them into folders, or ordering by person and scrolling through trying to find something, or creating crazy rules to try to organize the stuff for you.
I can see you are a bit closed minded there and don't understand how GMail should be used and what benefits it offers you. Im not going to go into these but I suggest an attitude switch might be enlightening. I can guarantee you once you learned how to use GMail properly you wouldn't go back. Of course I doubt that will ever happen *sigh*
WTF. No new contacts for Pro users??? Are you serious...
WTF!? I just looked at my new Gmail contacts interface. How do I delete a contact??
@petey
Seriously?
There are like 4 buttons there to take action on selected contacts.
And of those, only one actually makes sense as to where 'delete' might be.
But if you must - press all four to see what happens.
@petey Tcik the boxes next to the contacts you want to delete. Then click the more options drop-down. Easy.
I just want Gmail to take me back to my inbox after I do a Send..why do I want to be left staring at the message I just sent? Can't find a Lab for that...
Have they finally added Outlook Sync, like they do for Calendar?
@upsidedown how do you mean? The already support pop3 and imap... what else are you looking for?
@BlackHex
Soecifically for contacts. How do I sync Google contacts with Outlook. Perhaps I am missing something?
@upsidedown Ah, nope, contact sync is still a sore area :(
Now they just need to add a feature to disable automatically adding contacts. Nothing is more annoying than having to go through and manually clean out a bunch of excess contacts that I never added. Gmail, stop adding people that I send a few e-mails to to my contact list.
@Ngamer
I actually like and rely on this feature. I guess they should make it an option.
@Bobbo
I'm stuck cleaning out a dozen "sale-abcde-1234567890@craigslist.org" e-mail addresses every couple weeks. Plus custom support addresses and all sorts of junk that aren't people I talk to.
@Ngamer
I second that. I love you Google, but please don't continue down the "Microsoft knows best" way of thinking and give us options.
@AbeFroman
I'd hate to be one to defend Microsoft, but when it comes to their software, especially the Windows OS, they almost always have the ability to tweak or turn off a feature.
Apple on the other hand...
I like these updates, but for the love of god, when will they fix the pictures size problem you run in to when you sync these contacts with smarthphones???
If I had a nickle for everytime someone at Engadget used the phrase "lets be honest" in an article or podcast...I would be a very rich man.