Yesterday Google announced integration between their two killer communication applications: GMail and Google Talk. What’s interesting about the updates was that the main feature they added (the ability to archive your Google Talk logs inside of GMail) was something that my co-workers and I were talking about during the previous day’s lunch!
Since I now know that I have creative control over Google’s developers, I’d like to publicly share my other ideas for Google’s mail and chat clients (I expect these items to be finished by tomorrow morning of course :-).
GMail
- The number of filters allowed per account needs to be increased. Right now 20 is a good starting point, but I’ve only just started using GMail as my daily email client, and I already have 12. I can imagine needing more than 20 very soon (especially as I start re-subscribing to mailing lists that I had previously ditched thanks to them clogging up my Inbox).
- A filter should have the ability to recognize multiple senders or recipients, or even better recognize a sender or recipient based on their group membership. It could be that filters already do this, but if they do, I have seen no documentation or example as to how to accomplish this.
- Allow the search window to display more than 25 items at a time. This feature should mimic the “Maximum Page Size” preference. I went through and re-labeled over 7500 messages that previously had no labels, and it was very painful to do this 25 at a time!
Google Talk
- Have the client automatically go into away mode when I lock my Windows machine. This is something that Messenger does and is very convenient.
- When the interface is in “shade” mode allow for the input well to still be available. This will make it easy to send a quick response to a comment without having to expand the entire interface.
I’ll expand this list as I hear or think of other improvements to these applications. Do you have anything you would like to see? If so, let me know, and I’ll add them to the list.
Filed under general google
