Gmail 2.0

I just got my new Gmail 2.0. It improved the loading of messages, as promised. There was not drastic UI changes though.



One subtle change was done to the Quick Contact which is now renamed as Chat. And there is no setting to change the size of the then-Quick Contact; instead the size setting of the Chat is found in the Option menu at the bottom of the Chat list. And, instead of saying in terms of numbers, it uses descriptive qualifiers: Tiny, Small, etc.

Although there was a general improvement to the loading of messages, it still takes quite some time to load the All Mail and some messages that you haven't opened before.


Also, there is now a quick way to "Filter messages like these" which automatically fills in the From field of the filter. There is also a Mute option under the More Action menu; before, Mute was accessed by the key "M" and many people didn't know that.


The new redesigned Contacts is not impressive enough, considering that it sometimes breaks the whole Gmail application (I needed to restart Gmail). One good feature of new Contacts is Instant Search; you'll see the contacts as you search. The new design puts more emphasis on the Groups of contacts instead of showing all of them in one go. From each group, you select one contact and it will be shown on the right-hand side of the screen where you can edit or remove the contact and view Recent Conversations with that contact; but there's no way to come back to the contact once you view the recent conversation with him/her. Also, the new UI lacks any option to change the view of the Contacts: nothing like Outlook contact views and all you get is a single flat view of a list of contacts represented by the names.

I hope there will be more new features (actaully there are) coming soon.

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