

Gmail Retires 5 and Graduates 6 Labs Features - hasanove
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/gmail-labs-graduation-and-retirement.html

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jedbrown
Losing the fixed-width font is annoying to me. I frequently have code or logs
in emails, and these are horrible to read in a variable width font because
columns don't align, and ^^^ indicators don't line up. I'm curious why this
was abandoned.

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fragmede
Moreover, fixed-width font was probably a pretty easy lab feature to write,
and was already written. The other dropped features were also already written.
Why then, prune the list of lab features? Was the list of features getting too
long and no one wanted to put in the effort of categorizing them? Or was this
some market-droid idiot's idea of justifying their existence? (I was (also) a
fan of fixed-width...) Alternately, is it possible that there is a front end
'overhaul' coming down the pipes, and the abandoned lab features weren't worth
updating?

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nimrody
Maintaining stuff most people don't use is an unnecessary headache. Yes it
works today but what if some future gmail feature breaks it?

I'm pretty sure even Labs go through some sort of QA process.

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davidw
Gmail is really interesting. I'm a big free-software fan - I really dislike
running non-free stuff on my own computer. Not so much for RMS reasons, but
just because I like the freedom to hack on stuff as I see fit, and partly just
to support open source (it has given me _so_ much over the years). I've never
had that hangup about online services though, even though logically they're
not really that different. And indeed, I switched to Gmail several years ago
because their anti-spam was (and still is, I think) way better than what I was
able to cobble together with Linux.

However, every now and then I'm reminded that in giving up some freedom, you
pay a price. I would love to try and hack in a feature to Gmail that makes it
permanently associate certain From email adddresses with people. For instance,
if I write someone and set the From to @dedasys.com, I want future email with
that person to always use that address. If I use the @apache.org address, then
that should be used in the future, unless I change it. I can't implement this,
though, as far as I know.

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sliverstorm
> I can't implement this, though, as far as I know.

I understand your point, and I know you aren't arguing against Google, but...
supposing you were able to... would you? I'd bet at least 999 out of 1,000
users of any given open client- Thunderbird for example- would not invest the
effort, or could not due to lack of skill. And this is with Thunderbird-
GMail's penetration into markets with unskilled non hacker types is
drastically greater.

Ironically, I guess you could say my argument is that like the features they
are phasing out- not enough people would truly use it!

If you really wanted to, there might be that kind of ability in gears. Perhaps
low level, or perhaps just through manipulating the UI- a bit of a macro.

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davidw
Yes, it's likely I would if it weren't too difficult.

I implemented the "Oops, do you want to send an attachment" feature in mutt
years ago, and sent in the patch, which, sadly, was not accepted.

 _Most_ people don't hack on stuff - no argument there. But some of us do, and
I think that we occasionally make the world a better place.

~~~
sliverstorm
The more power to ya then :)

No disagreement here. hackers have made my world a much better place many
times.

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PStamatiou
R.I.P. Location in Signature. Was an interesting feature for those that
traveled a lot (and thus not require us to explain any long delays in email
reply time). Although I did forget about it from time to time. Boy did she not
like seeing "Sent from Las Vegas, NV, United States" in my sig..

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andyking
I never managed to get it to actually say where I was - it would frequently
decide I was in London or some other random place hundreds of miles away where
(presumably) my ISP had a presence. On one particularly memorable occasion, I
got an email reply saying "why are you in Southend-on-Sea? We're supposed to
be meeting in Manchester at 2pm". I quickly turned it off after that - the
lack of accuracy made it more of a problem than a useful feature.

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pilif
No wonder fixed-width font goes away due to not being used. Why did they have
to insist on setting the message's font to "Courier New, Courier, fixed"
instead of just fixed?

Courier is even worse than the proportional standard. Why not respect the
setting that was defined in the browser?

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davidmurphy
Thanks, Google, for continuing to provide useful features in Labs.

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yan
Noticed my 'go to label' shortcut got updated. I like the new interface much
more than what it used to be, but am not a fan of the scroll area jumping
around.

The 'gl' (go label) shortcut used to display an auto-complete text box in the
center of your gmail window to enter a label, now 'gl' jumps to the search box
and automatically prepends 'label:' to the query. It makes much more sense to
do it in the search box, but doesn't feel as fluid as the old one.

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DannoHung
Noooooo, fixed width font was the best!

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stanleydrew
Anybody else sad to see muzzle go? I think rolling over contacts in the gchat
pane in order to see their status messages is perfect. Now I will only be able
to see half as many contact names...

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Madhav_
yea I really liked muzzle. It's kinda annoying not having it.

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kadavy
I can't believe they're retiring "random signature" I so _thought_ about using
it. I could have had a different funny quote in my signature for every email I
sent.

