Finally invisible mode on Gmail Chat..!!

I had written a post about missing feature on Gtalk- invisible mode. Last weekend I saw that Gmail Chat added invisible mode feature. It gives flexibility to the user to be in invisible/visible mode.

But this feature wasn’t added to Gtalk which is almost the replica of Gmail chat. So, if a user has logged in to Gtalk and Gmail chat simultaneously then Gmail chat doesn’t allow user to change the mode to invisible mode. I hope soon Google would add this feature to Gtalk also.

Google Talk's Schizophrenia Problem

As you all know, google put a small Google talk box on the gmail page. Nice touch I thought. So now when I check mail, I can also see people online.

Now the problem is when you're logged on to the desktop client too. Then a window pops up in gmail as well as gtalk, but if your friend is using the desktop client and so are you, then only the first message comes up in the Gmail client.

If you thought that was it, I'm just getting started :).

If you start talking to a friend on the Gmail client, then later move to the desktop client, you can't see you're recent messages. And by chance if you're friend is using the Gmail client, all messages keep appearing there. Oh boy!!

And now for the killer. If you're using just the gmail client, you start talking to a friend, but managing multiple chats inside the gmail client is a pain. Imagine having multiple windows as below clouding the bottom part of your Gmail page.


The guys at Google thought of that, and they created this nifty feature of allowing you to pop out a chat window.
So you might have multiple chat windows open at any point of time. But once in a while, you might refresh the gmail page to see if you have any new mail. Or God forbid you close the browser. And poof!, all the chat windows you popped out are gone!!!

Google though gives you this very handy message below!


P.S. I thought I wouldn't post screenshots for the rest of the issues so as not to take the focus away from this gem :).

Gmail Attachment

To attach a file on Gmail, you need to click on the “Attach a file” link, on clicking that a text box comes along with a “Browse” button. If you want to add one more file, again you need to click “Attach another file” and then you need to click again on “Browse” button to browse through the files in your machine.

To attach a file you need to do 2 clicks. So that means for 5 attachments, you need to do 10 clicks and browsing through the file 5 times. It’s obvious that the user wants to browse when he clicks on “Attach a file” link. So a “File upload” window to browse should pop up on clicking “Attach a file” link, reducing one click per attachment.It should also provide an option of multi selecting the files in a folder. These files can be shown to the user the way multiple email addresses are shown. For that the UI can be changed a little bit as shown below.
To remove a file, just delete the way you delete the email addresses. And for attaching more than one file from different folders, just clicking on browse button and select the file.