Google’s Gmail Changes and Adds Functionality
July 1, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
I loaded Gmail tonight and was welcomed with a notice that there’s been a little bit of an interface change. They’ve added some AJAXy ability to drag and drop messages onto your defined labels to label the messages.
You can see the little handles on each message line on the far left side of the message. You can then drag the message on top of the label you want to apply to the message. Not the major improvement from their perspective, but I really like the fact they moved the labels up to be positioned right under the standard groupings of messages.
The one thing I’m not sure how I like yet, is that when I drag a message onto one of the labels it immediately archives the message out of my Inbox. I frequently will add labels to messages but leave them in the Inbox. That may take some getting adjusted to.
If you want to use the drag and drop functionality for labels, yet you want to leave the message in your inbox, instead of dragging the message to the label, drag the label to the message. The message gets labeled and stays in your inbox.
Dragging messages to the label ‘moves’ them to that label or ‘folder’. Dragging a label to marked messages just applies that label to those messages in that particular label or ‘folder’.
It’s actually quite neat – Google has managed to create a sort of folder concept (without the nesting or hierarchical structure) and still keep the label concept.