Introducing the new compose in Gmail

I hate being the guy who sidetracks a thread off the bat by complaining about something unrelated, but...<p>Whatever blogspot theme Google uses for this blog is just god awful (oh, I see, this is it: <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/p/as-you-may-have-noticed-gmail-blog-has.html" rel="nofollow">http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/p/as-you-may-have-noticed-gm...</a>), and I swear it gets worse every time I view a post there.<p>To wit:<p>When I load the page I see the orange "loading" gears. Then that sliiiiides up to reveal the content. Really? Can they really not innovate here? This is a company that spends massive amounts of resources to get their homepage to load as quickly as possible. Heck, they even penalize companies in their index with slow loading times. And yet they purposefully add loading animations and transitions which add <i>at least</i> a second to page load, and probably more as far as time it takes me to engage in the content.<p>Also, every time I reload the page I see something different. Sometimes there is text in the black menu bar. Sometimes there is not. Sometimes there is an "extra" screen that slides up after the orange loading gears, sometimes not. Sometimes the sidebar navigation is there, sometimes not. Try refresh a few times yourself and you'll see.<p>Also, I love the five-second delay for the document URL update when you navigate via the sidebar.<p>All of these fancy, look-we're-using-ajax, gee-whiz-its-a-single-page-app features -- just for a simple blog post. Talk about complicating a simple problem!<p>Again, apologies for the rant but I couldn't even concentrate on what the blog post was saying because I was so distracted by this garbage.

<i>Saving a draft, opening the old email, and then reopening your draft wastes valuable minutes. The new compose pops up in a window, just like chats (only larger).</i><p>Minutes? I do sometimes wonder where the day goes...<p>Alternatively, Shift-click on compose (or press capital C to with keyboard shortcuts on), and you'll get an actual window that you can move and resize. With the chat mini-windows I frequently wish that I could adjust them, and often accidentally collapse them by clicking in what looks like a title bar.<p>Or if you already have a message open, just shift-click on Inbox to open a new window. Or not --- Google in their wisdom has disabled that to prevent confusing some poor soul with a broken shift key, praise be their servers. But C-n for a new window, ma-return, /search, C-w isn't that bad.<p>I like the idea of minimizing the address area, but don't understand the advantages of the new approach. Is it primarily for tablet compatibility? Or is the concept of windows still considered unteachable? And why are they decreasing support for traditional click modifiers?

I can see the merits of this, but I'm curious about how it fits into a mobile strategy.<p>My big complaint about email, especially gmail, is that it seems to insist on keeping too many elements from desktop to mobile. My mobile email needs are much more like my SMS needs, yet the UX for mobile Gmail (for example) largely resembles the desktop client.<p>I know that's tangential, but it's what's on my mind regarding Gmail right now.

I prefer Gmail since its redesign back in April.<p>There, I said it.

Is this really a step forward? It feels a little bit like a step backwards -- more like classic email clients and less like Gmail.

Does anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail?<p>Midway while typing this post, I did a search and boom: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3581613" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3581613</a>

You can still open up emails in the larger view, If I'm not mistaken. I can see and have experienced the issue they are attempting to solve here and this seems like an ok solution. I guess we won't know until we try it. Most emails are short however, at least that should be your goal unless it's something more detailed and then you have a larger canvas to work with.

I think they should add a maximize button to this window. Sometimes you just want to edit one email in full screen, and I don't think you should have to revert to the previous interface to do that.

And ... addressing the content of this blog post: yet another reason mutt wins as a mail client.<p>Open mutt (preferably under screen so you can 'C-a "' between mail folders), view message(s) you want to reference (optionally: tag relevant messages, using mutt's filtering tools as necessary, than 'l ~T' to restrict to just the tagged messages, allowing you to rapidly reference a set of messages.<p>Fire up a new terminal window (I bind this to '&#60;shift&#62;&#60;alt&#62;t' in my window manager) and write "mutt -s 'subject line'" to start your message, drop into the address lookup window to designate recipients, and edit away in your editor of choice.<p>And all of this without the multi-gigabyte overhead of a full browser session + gmail.<p>Oh yeah: offlineimap means you can work on your GMail account (and/or any other accounts you've configured for mutt) readily.<p>Just sayin'.

Good.<p>The most annoying thing to me about gmail's interface is center-clicking on something (to reference it, like something in a mailing list) and having the entire window redirected.<p>This is cool :)

Interesting that they took this approach primarily for email referencing. Is it that common of a use case that it's worth changing the entire experience around it (and collapsing the formatting bar, etc.)? I'm assuming they tested some sort of referencing UI in the existing compose screen. Wish I could see that. Also, I'm wondering how image insertion works; modals upon modals can be pretty awkward for users.<p>My real pet peeve: can we start removing "Compose" from email vocabulary?

Ahhh, it's good to see more useful desktop features making their way online (how old is multi-tasking?). Now we wait for the gmail OS that can run applications...

I would really appreciate if Google took some time to work on the speed issues we now experience with Gmail instead of working on this cosmetic changes.<p>I use Gmail basically ever since it was on early early stages (I even pay for more storage for years now) and the degradation of performance is the one thing that makes me think of leaving the service for something snappier.

It seems like many people don't like this, but I had this exact issue last night. And opening another tab takes a while to load simply because the gmail app is so big. So while I'm not sure about this exact implementation yet, it could be a nice feature.

I think it looks great. Many times I've opened gmail in another tab to find some info.

On a meta-note, I hate, hate HATE how this blog and G+ blog posts hijack the space bar. I use spacebar as page down and it never works in G+, and it doesn't on this blog either.

I will enjoy this a lot, because I do often save drafts to go looking for some other message in my inbox. However, I think it saves valuable seconds, not minutes. :-)

I welcome this change if they implement it well. I sometimes keep two gmail windows open so that I can compose in one while I reference emails or search in the other.

Does anyone else suffer from EXTREMELY slow gmail. This happens for me across all devices, browsers, and even IMAP. 30+ seconds to load messages sometimes and lots of 17, 317 and 503 errors.<p>I've tried every recommendation, and of course hear nothing back from their support or in their forums. Gmail is almost unusable for me now.<p>Any recommendations or contacts would be appreciated. It seems the only way to get help from Google is to know someone.

Ugh. Gmail continues to roll out new features and arbitrary tweaks, yet the bugs impeding normal tasks continues to grow. I've said it before: can I just have gmail beta back?<p>(The main ones for me are the compose window never actually loading, or new messages in a thread not displaying (both requiring a refresh). Meanwhile, the chat hover has changed layout twice. Seriously?)

I tried it and it is annoying. Compose window is located in the lower right corner of the screen, and cannot be moved to the middle.

Does anyone know if there's a way to try this out before they roll it out? It doesn't mention anything about it on the blog.

Speaking on a tangent. Has anybody not found it annoying that you can't auto-BCC yourself in Gmail? Only if you do so does it pull up the message thread to the top which I prefer to keep track of timelines. I would be fine without the BCC as long as the thread reflects my response time. Either way, room for improvement.

Does anyone else get annoyed when replying to threads with multiple people?<p>I always want to reply to the most recent message, but usually someone else responds while I am composing. So I have to view their message and reply to that instead of to the original message. Does this happen to anyone else, or am I taking crazy pills?

What gmail really needs to change is the "reply" box. When I'm composing a regular email I get a nice big box in which to type my email. When I'm typing a reply email I just have a little tiny (vertically tiny) box to type my reply. Why?????? So annoying.

That looks great!<p>It feels to me though that google is still playing serious catch-up to it's main competitors (yahoo &#38; microsoft) in the email arena who both have great web-mail solutions that don't get the accolades they deserve.<p>Now all I need is full folder support and I'm happy!

don't like this at all, it looks like a step backwards, let the windows manager handle windows instead of doing it inside your webapp, next thing you know they are going to add a taskbar on the browser for each open pseudo-window

Good. I wonder if this also addresses the problem when you are replying to a long chain of email conversation, the compose box includes the entire chain while also displaying the chain above the compose box. Very unpleasant.

or you could just use the old html version of gmail, and open as many messages as you like in different tabs.<p><a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html" rel="nofollow">http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html</a>

It's amazing, when you ask "why would you need a whole page for composing an email?" there is no good answer. Someone dozens of years ago probably made that decision and it's just stuck.

How is this return to popups any different to the option that's always been present, shift-click to open compose in a new window. Personally, I liked having the choice.

I've been using this side-by-side with the old UX on my personal account for weeks (months?). Much prefer the new UX. Glad it's finally launching.

I like it. I cannot count the number of times I've just popped open a new gmail tab to address this exact shortcoming.

awesome! this makes up quite a bit of the love they lost with their abyssmal redesign earlier this year!

Am I missing something or is there no way to pick the sender address in the new composer?

Might be good, but I can't use this until they support canned responses again.

The Sparrow team hard at work

Looks like pushing google plus to all gmail users.

Yahoo mail has half those features already

I use IMAP :)

Why is this so important that it reaches top spot in minutes. My links to curing cancer with ultrasound or creating ai get nothing, but the big G opens a new window for compose and it's a giant leap for humanity!<p>Peter Norvig gave singularity summit talk on exciting work they're doing <a href="http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Peter_Norvig_Channeling_the_Flood_of_Data" rel="nofollow">http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Peter_Norvig_Channeling_the_Flood_...</a> , why isn't that top spot?<p>HN is kowtowing to the pseudo-brogrammer crowd.

<i>facepalm</i><p>All of the pain points that this supposedly solves have already been solved with tabs. Middle click compose and all of those problems are solved with the added bonus of having an entire screen to write your email in.<p>Google is being taken over by pointy haired managers and marketing. RIP.

This is great. I've hated having to open multiple tabs to be able to reference an old email(s) and compose a new one at the same time.

Are we stupid or something? First, why the hell are we arguing over the freakin' theme here? Seriously. This tangent discussion should be removed. If you want to complain about the stupid theme, which I also find it hard to use, start your own thread.<p>Secondly, are we stupid for using these annoying shift, control shortcuts? Google is not reinventing the wheel. Google is not used by elite computer programmers. I don't even use emacs because I am a VIM user. GMail is used by over a billion user and most of them don't even know some shortcuts or nice ways to make their tasks better.<p>I don't know all the secrets you guys are pointing out, and are you going to call me stupid? This is not reinventing wheel. It's just making the app more usable.<p>If anyone start spamming me with "you can already do this with X, Y , Z ways but it's not known by everyone...".