Is this "feature" new?
All of the sudden recently I noticed a lot of single word quoted replies happening to me, and I figured it was a bug.
The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
161–170 of 179 posts
Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
#162Wow, it's a slow news day on HN today. Here is the email feature I want. If I paste a URL that looks like a post/article into a new message, I want the slug automagically split, title cased and copied into the subject line. For example: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/11/the-greatest-google-mail-feature-you.html Would generate this subject: The Greatest Google Mail Feature You Yes, this was a bad example because the title h…
Or they could just do what Facebook does and load the page server-side and get the real title.
Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
#163In a related note, I hate how Google promotes top posting even when I select a specific quote.
What's wrong with top-posting? (I've using email since the 90s, and at some point I realized I only disliked top-posting because of its cultural significance--I now prefer it for its functional advantages.)
This old saw explains it pretty well:
=======
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
=======
As ever, there are exceptions, with one-on-one, serial email being the most prevalent. But if there's more than one recipient, top-posting is godawfully confusing.
Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
#164That's neat. I used to cut down emails by means of ctrl-K in my browser, which, being mapped to emacs keys, means "delete this line". However, in their brand new email compose thing, Google has seen fit to override this, making that key combination point to "make a hyperlink" or some such BS, causing me much, much frustration. Yes, I know, you can still utilize the old way of doing things... but for how long until th…
Why aren't we able to rebind these keys at will? Why is it hardcoded? We've been able to rebind keys in videogames for a long time. Why can't we rebind ctrl+o to be cut, ctrl+t to be undo, and ctrl+k to be "delete this line"? Why can't we have ctrl+v be one clipboard and ctrl+f be a different one?
Web developers are in the process of re-inventing everything that the desktop solved in the 90s. Meanwhile, the desktop is in the process of destroying everything it solved in the 90s. Ah, progress.
Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
#165While we are talking about greatest features and GMail... it would be awfully nice if they would finally implement some sort of sub-string search, given it's almost 2013 and they are synonymous with searching and finding things on the internet. It is incredibly frustrating that in order to be able to find an email I received years ago I have to figure out exactly how someone might have written a certain term in that…
Even though sub-string search is a slightly offtopic for this post I'll go on with this.
As a native Finn it's quite hard to use Gmail search for anything in our native language.
Just an example. If I want to search for, as an example, invoices (which many companies send directly to your email) I simply cannot do it.
The reason is this: "Tässä laskunne" - "Here is your invoice" "Saitte laskun" - "You've received an invoice" "Puhelinlasku" - "Mobile bill" (the monthly invoice)
The word for invoice in Finnish is "lasku". And there are immense amount of ways to morph the word. And that is with every word. So in order to search for those kinds of mails we usually just search in the basic form. In GMail it's impossible so it's a pure guessing game.
I think this shows nicely that when developing something and thinking "This feature is not really needed" you might accidentally ruin the whole main feature for use cases you're not familiar with.
Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
#166I 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 agree that select-causes-action in the NYT site is bad design, I'm not sure that select-then-take-action-affects-selected is bad design. In the later, it is the normal, expected way to take actions on a subset of the text. Sure, they could add a "reply - selected" button or dropdown option, but that would be a bit kludgey, and people would complain about the complicated/bloated UI.
Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
#167Normally titles like this are just insipid articles of link bait, but I agree this is a handy feature. Thanks!
Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
#168So many people in this thread are saying they highlight sections of text as they read. I don't do that, and no-one I know does that. What is the benefit? Is it intentional, or is it a habit with no real use?
Same reason some people line up the pens on their desk or tap their fingers.
Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
"Curious... Why are you selecting? Is it to assist in reading, or some other reason?" Sometimes unconscious compulsion, otherwise to put together a quote in the context of an existing thread. I immediately noticed this feature due to the high number of discards :)
>I immediately noticed this feature due to the high number of discards
the same here.
Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
#170[deleted]