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The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

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Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#121

Post by Tomis02 »

raldi wrote: post #114
Tomis02 wrote: post #107

That's all nice and dandy, but check this out. For a few months now I've been noticing that emails from my inbox were being moved after a few days into spam, without any kind of warning. This happens once every two weeks, more or less. We're not talking about false positives, these are emails that stay in my inbox for days before being moved to the spam folder. Which basically means I need to check my spam folder eve…

Do you have keyboard shortcuts enabled?

No. What does that have to do with anything?

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#123

Post by languagehacker »

That's a feature in Mail.app, too. Does that mean I should write a blog post about it? Will it get to the front page of Hacker News? Will it get to the top? What if I say it's the best feature you're not using on Mail.app? I'd be wrong, but people would still go to my site, right?

I honestly think HN should be doing more about linkbait like this.

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#125

Post by creamyhorror »

scrumper wrote: post #53
hartror wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my that NYT feature drove me nuts. Not only does it mess with us habitual selectors but it is basically hidden from the users who need it most, those not savy enough to select-right-click-search-on-google a word they don't understand.

> habitual selectors Ah, my condition has a name. All it needs now is a support group. My case become terminal when I discovered three finger drag on OSX. HN is a particularly good site to do it on because of the little lines and gaps that appear between selected blocks of comments. You can get a very satisfying 'pop' of a multi-comment selection springing from a single one if you move your mouse just a bit while dra…

New recruit reporting for duty. I've never seen anyone else read webpages the same way I do - by selecting to scroll - so it's a surprise to finally find my kin. I guess it was more likely to happen on a place like HN?

Scrolling without selecting is just disorienting when I'm reading.

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#126

Post by guiambros »

cardamomo wrote: post #108
georgeott wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious... Why are you selecting? Is it to assist in reading, or some other reason?

I often select text so that I have an easy visual reference when I'm scrolling down. I don't want to scroll too far!

I do exactly the same. For me it's not really selection reading, but selection marking, when scrolling.

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#127

Post by Gustomaximus »

tammer wrote: post #119

Great! Except lately I've come to despise ui elements that can only be discovered by accident. An easily usable and effective feature that I only find via a blog post is a feature that could use some visual feedback.

This is an unfair comment. Think about all the features gmail has that aren't buttons in the UI. Would you really like 1) Buttons for all of these 2) some pop-up or otherwise annoying message coming up for each of these features when your trying to write/read an email?

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#128

Post by maguay »

chockablock wrote: post #106
iamjs wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So happy to see that others have this habit of selecting and highlighting bits of text as they read. I've been ridiculed for it, but I'm not the only one!

I'm a clicky-reader too and I'm not ashamed to say it!

I'm amazed and excited we're all in such good company. Thought I was the only one who selected text all the time. But then, I but most of us view source often, and hover and look at where links point to before clicking, both things the general populace doesn't do.

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#129

Post by blntechie »

barrkel wrote: post #30
hartror wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my that NYT feature drove me nuts. Not only does it mess with us habitual selectors but it is basically hidden from the users who need it most, those not savy enough to select-right-click-search-on-google a word they don't understand.

I used AdBlock to stop the NYT script that implements it from loading. A large chunk of the reason I dislike Chrome is because of its weird text selection logic compared to Firefox - boundaries around paragraph starts and ends feel unnatural.

Ah. Finally someone here who share my dislike for Chrome for the same reason. It does not snap selections at end of lines and paragraphs and makes too hard to read for people like us. Whenever I used to explain this as my reason behind preferring Firefox to Chrome, I've got curious looks.

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#130

Post by jessedhillon »

cpeterso wrote: post #62
dlss wrote: post #5

I do use this feature -- I often select random blocks of text while reading. This feature means I often (5-10% of the time) have to click discard and then reply again to get my desired behavior. In related news nytimes.com used to have a similar feature where the definition of words would pop up when you selected them. It basically caused me to stop reading their site.

I've created a poll to collect the reasons why people, like me, select text when they read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4839436

It needs a "Yes, and I don't know why I do it" option
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