Gmail Enhancements: Drag and Drop Attachments, Insert Calendar Invitations
The old way of attaching a file to an outgoing email message went something like this: you had to first click "Attach a file" -> then you had to look for the file you wanted to attach -> then select it and click "Open". This whole process could prove to be very tedious. What could make the user experience a lot better is if said user could simply drag and drop the files he or she wants to attach.
That is precisely what Google recently announced – the option to drag and drop files to attach them to emails. Say I am looking at some pictures and decide I want to email to my friend Bob. I already have the folder containing the images open. I simply need to access Gmail, compose an email, then drag and drop the images I want to send out.
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There is one little catch though. This feature works only with Google’s own browser, Google Chrome, and with the Mozilla-developed Firefox browser (version 3.6, mind you).
“We'll enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature. For now, you can drag and drop attachments in Chrome and Firefox only,” explained Google Software Engineer Adam de Boor.
Moving on, Google made Gmail better by recently having launched a feature that brings tighter integration between Gmail and Calendar. In the past, if you wanted to do something with friends that share their Calendar with you, say go out to see a movie, you first had to check their Calendar, then switch to Gmail and send them an email invite. You can forget about this. Now Gmail displays an “Insert: Invitation” link under the subject line. Click that link and a small window will appear – in it you can see your availability and the availability of the friend(s) you want to send the email to (granted of course they are sharing their calendar with you). See when your friend or when your friends are available and set up an even from within Gmail. The event will be added to your calendar and to your friends’ calendars when you send the email.
The old way of attaching a file to an outgoing email message went something like this: you had to first click "Attach a file" -> then you had to look for the file you wanted to attach -> then select it and click "Open". This whole process could prove to be very tedious. What could make the user experience a lot better is if said user could simply drag and drop the files he or she wants to attach.