Tag Archive: labs

Jul 14

Tasks graduates from Gmail Labs

Categories:

Official Gmail News

by Jim

July 14, 2009

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by James Watts, Software Engineer

Our little baby’s all grown up.

We launched Gmail Labs as a forum for delivering useful (and maybe not so useful) features that might not be quite ready for prime time. The idea was always that the most popular and viable Labs features would graduate and be made more readily available to all users…and that some of the less used, less viable ones would disappear forever.

I’m proud to announce that Tasks is in that first bucket — it’s been one of the most popular experimental Gmail features and it’s now the first graduate from Labs.

To access Tasks, starting today you can just click “Tasks” under the “Contacts” link above your chat list (no need to turn it on from the Labs tab anymore).

We’ve been continually improving Tasks since it first launched in Labs. We believe simple and fast is best, so we’ve been working to make Tasks more responsive and get basic interactions working better: we’ve added mobile and gadget views, made improvements to task editing and management, launched in more languages, and integrated with Google Calendar. We’ve also added a printable view for those people compelled to do things away from their computers or mobile devices.

Rest assured there’s more on the way for Tasks— just because we’re graduation from Labs today doesn’t mean we’re done.

We’ve received a lot of positive feedback about Gmail Labs, and we’ve found that testing something in Labs can be a good way to help decide whether it should become a regular part of Gmail. So we decided to extend the same model to Google Calendar. Beginning today, you can add Labs features to your calendar too, such as Free or Busy, which lets you to see which of your friends or coworkers are currently in meetings or World Clock, which helps you keep track of different timezones when you schedule meetings. Take a look at the Google Apps blog for more info.

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Tasks graduates from Gmail Labs

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Apr 17

New in Labs: Suggest more recipients

Categories:

Official Gmail News

by Jim

April 17, 2009

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Ari Leichtberg, Software Engineer

Have you ever realized you mistakenly left someone important out of an email, or just spent too much time trying to decide who from your long list of contacts to include? Well, some of us on the Gmail team feel your pain, so we wrote a new Gmail Labs feature called “Suggest more recipients.”

Once you’ve enabled it from the Labs tab under Settings, you’ll see suggested recipients while composing messages. Gmail will suggest people you might want to include based on the groups of people you email most often. So if you always email your mom, dad, and sister together, and you start composing a message to your mom and dad, Gmail will suggest adding your sister. Enter at least two recipients and any suggestions will show up like this:


Click on a suggested name, and they’ll get added to your email.

Hopefully having lots of friends and co-workers just got a bit less onerous for you. (Oh, the burden of popularity!) Enjoy, and as usual, please let us know what you think.

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New in Labs: Suggest more recipients

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Apr 09

New in Labs: Inserting images

Categories:

Official Gmail News

by Jim

April 9, 2009

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Kent Tamura, Software Engineer

Well, it’s about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on “Inserting images” from the Labs tab under Settings, and you’ll see a new toolbar icon like this:

Make sure you’re in rich formatting mode, or it won’t show up. Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: by uploading image files from your computer or providing image URLs.

Keep in mind that Gmail doesn’t show URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you’re sending mail to other Gmail users, they’ll still have to click “Display images below” or “Always display images from …” to see images you embed.

Got feedback on inserting images? Send it our way.

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New in Labs: Inserting images

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Apr 08

New in Labs: Sender time zone

Categories:

Official Gmail News

by Jim

April 8, 2009

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Marcin Brodziak, Software Engineer

Let’s say your girlfriend sends you an angry email. It’s mostly about how you behaved at the party last night and then left for a business trip without saying goodbye. You read it from the other side of the globe, jet-lagged after a 12 hour flight. You want to call and sort things out, but forget that it’s now almost 3:00 am her time. After waking her up, things only get worse.

There’s a new feature in Gmail Labs called Sender Time Zone that can help. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Settings, and you’ll see green phone icons next to people who are probably awake and readily reachable (if it’s between 9:00 am and 6:00 pm in the sender’s local time zone) and red ones next to those who could be sleeping or out of the office:

Click “show details” and you can see when a message was sent in the sender’s time zone as well as what time it is for them now:

Message headers always include the time sent and often include time zone info too. We use that information to show you these icons. If the time zone isn’t included for a given message, this Labs feature won’t display anything. Try it out and tell us what you think.

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New in Labs: Sender time zone

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Apr 07

A new mobile Gmail experience for iPhone and Android

Categories:

Official Gmail News

by Jim

April 7, 2009

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Rob Kroeger, Engineer, Google Mobile

Today we’re introducing a major revision to Gmail for mobile that takes advantage of the latest browser technology available on iPhone and Android devices. We’ve updated the user interface, made it faster to open messages, allowed for batch actions (like archiving multiple messages at once), and added some basic offline support

Despite the advent of 3G networks and wifi, smartphones still lack a high-speed, always-on broadband connection and can have connections far less reliable than their desktop brethren. So, just like when we redesigned the Gmail for mobile client app last October, we’ve gone back to the drawing board and redesigned Gmail for the mobile browser to overcome some of these limitations. We made performance more consistent, regardless of connection type, and laid the foundation for future improvements.

Now, when you go to gmail.com from your iPhone or Android browser, archiving email is quicker because it doesn’t require a response from a remote server. Instead, we cache mail on the device itself (using database storage on the iPhone and a device-local mobile Gears database on Android-powered phones). Actions like archiving or starring messages are first applied to this cache and then sent to Gmail servers in the background whenever a network connection is available. You only have to wait for a response from the server when you’re requesting an uncached message or list of messages. As a result, you can start-up Gmail even if you’re on a slow connection. You can even compose mail and open recently read messages while offline.

We made extensive use of other browser functions too: for example, the floaty bar that lets you archive, delete or apply more actions is animated via CSS transformations and controlled in part with touch events (when you scroll the screen, it follows you).


The HTML5 canvas tag is used to render the progress spinner without the overhead of downloading animated GIFs to the device. Now that we’ve developed a framework for the new Gmail for mobile, we’re planning a whole lot more: faster performance, improved offline operation, new functionality, and interface enhancements that take advantage of the unique properties of smartphones.

To try this new version of Gmail for mobile, just go to gmail.com from your mobile browser. It’s currently available on any Android-powered devices or iPhone OS 2.2.1 or higher. For now, the new version is available in English only. We’ll be rolling this version out to everyone over the course of the day, so if you don’t see the updated user interface yet (you’ll know you have it when you see that floaty bar), check back soon. For easy access, we recommend creating a homescreen link.

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A new mobile Gmail experience for iPhone and Android

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Apr 02

Gmail turns 5

Categories:

Official Gmail News

by Jim

April 2, 2009

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager

Five years ago yesterday, Gmail starting giving people a gig. What started as an internal tool for Google employees is now used by tens of millions of people around the world in 52 languages.

In honor of the occasion, you may have noticed a little cake on the Gmail homepage today.

Gmail 5th birthday cake

We wanted to put it there yesterday, but given that Gmail launched on April Fool’s day 2004 and has a history of joking around on April 1st since then, we did something else instead.

In all seriousness, we want to give a big thank you to all of you who use Gmail every day, to those who’ve been around since the beginning, to those who were using an AJAX app before the term AJAX was popular, to those who started chatting right in your email and then video chatting a couple years later, to those who changed your theme on day one, and to those who have turned on some of the 43 experimental Gmail Labs features (and put up with the occasional bugs they introduce)…we couldn’t have gotten here without you. Thanks.

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Gmail turns 5

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Apr 02

New in Labs: Gmail search made easier (and lazier)

Categories:

Official Gmail News

by Jim

April 2, 2009

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Ibrahim Bokharouss, Software Engineer

On the Gmail team, we believe finding the right email among thousands of messages can be as important as finding the right web page across the billions of web pages out there. So with the aim of making search in Gmail easier, we built a new experimental feature in Gmail Labs: Search Autocomplete.

Turn on Search Autocomplete from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings, and you’ll get suggestions as you type in the search box. One of the most popular searches in Gmail is for names or email addresses, so the first kind of suggestions you’ll see are contacts. Some names are not easy to remember (my last name is an excellent example!) — with this new Labs feature you can just type a couple letters and select the desired contact from the drop down list. Easy and quick as that.

Gmail also offers a bunch of advanced search operators, which provide a powerful way to find that one message you have in mind. You can search in specific places (e.g. in chats or sent items), or search for messages with attachments of a certain type (e.g. docs or photos). Suppose I want to search for photos that were sent to me by my friend Chris. Normally, I would have to enter Chris’ email address followed by filename:(jpg OR png), which I gladly admit is even a bit too geeky for me. With Search Autocomplete, I can just type “photos” or “pictures,” select “has photos” from the drop down list (as in the screenshot below), and the search query (filename:(jpg OR png)) gets inserted for me. Similarly, you can type in the word “attachment” and Search Autocomplete will list the most common attachment types for you.

One of the reasons we still show you the geeky search query is to allow you to adapt it to your needs. For example, if you’d like to include tiff files in your search result, you can adapt the query manually to filename:(jpg OR png OR tiff).

That’s it for now. Play around and make sure to use the time that you save on searching to let us know what you think.

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New in Labs: Gmail search made easier (and lazier)

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Mar 30

Typing in Indian Languages

Categories:

Official Gmail News

by Jim

March 30, 2009

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Anuj Sharma, Software Engineer

Until now, there hasn’t been a good way to send email to friends and family in Hindi, my native language and their language of choice. That’s why I’m happy to announce a new feature for Gmail that lets you type email in Indian languages. If you’re in India, this feature is enabled by default. If not, you’ll need to turn it on in the “Language” section under Settings. Once enabled, just click the Indian languages icon and type words in the way they sound in English — Gmail will automatically convert them to their Indian language equivalent.

For example, if you have Hindi selected, “namaste” will transliterate to “नमस्ते.” We currently support five Indian languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, and businesses and schools using Google Apps should see this in the coming weeks.

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Typing in Indian Languages

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Mar 19

New in Labs: Undo Send

Categories:

Official Gmail News

by Jim

March 19, 2009

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Michael Leggett, User Experience Designer

Sometimes I regret sending a message the morning after. Other times I send a message and then immediately notice a mistake. I forget to attach a file or email the birthday girl that I can’t make her surprise party. I can rush to close my browser or unplug the Internet — but Gmail almost always wins that race.

An email to the wrong Larry pushed me over the edge. I could undo just about any other action in Gmail — why couldn’t I undo send? Many people agreed, including Yuzo Fujishima, an engineer in the Tokyo office. My theory (which others shared) was that even just five seconds would be enough time to catch most of those regrettable emails.

And now you can do just that. Turn on Undo Send in Gmail Labs under Settings, and you’ll see a new “Undo” link on every sent mail confirmation. Click “Undo,” and we’ll grab the message before it’s sent and take you right back to compose.

This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we’ll still send your message.

I’ve had Undo Send turned on for a while and it’s saved me several times. Let us know if it saves you too.

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New in Labs: Undo Send

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