New in Gmail Labs: Unread message icon | Hacker News Reader

New in Gmail Labs: Unread message icon

gmailblog.blogspot.com

179 pointsjulian3773 comments

I had no idea Chrome had that "pin tabs" feature until I read this blog post. My tab bar is suddenly a lot neater without the ever-present Gmail/HN/SO occupying as much space as the stuff I'm actively working on.

Love the pin feature! Also note, anything you install via the web store can be configured to always open in a pinned tab by clicking on the little wrench when you hover over the app icon. For me it's Mail, Calendar and Grooveshark. Why would I ever close them?

It used to be that you couldnt SOMETHING-w to close a pinned tab. If you did that, it would just gray out and when you clicked on it, it reopened in at the same location.

Now, it has to stay open, you can close w/o taking extra actions and it is always using memory for the full page.

I tell you all of this so hopefully you can imagine how much better it used to be and I can add you to the campaign to get the old behavior back.

For a while there the persistent-but-closed state of pinned tabs was coming in and out randomly for me (based on updates on whichever repository I was on).

I agree, the old behavior of having a dual-state pinned tab was VERY nice. I pretty much always have three pinned tabs now (GMail, GMail, GReader), but it used to be a few more. Now if I close GReader, which I do if I'm focusing down on working and know I won't be hitting it, it disappears - instead of that little placeholder.

I've been hoping re-enabling that behavior it was an option I just missed somewhere. I guess not.

Me neither. But I have multiple gmail apps open. How do I tell the difference? grah.

Tooltips on the tab.

Tooltips take about 2 seconds to show on mouse-over. If you had to do it all the time to figure out which account you're looking/peeking at, you'd go nuts.

Positioning.

Have them all forward to one gmail account and manage them from there.

There's a "multiple inboxes" labs feature that would probably come in handy for this.

one's personal and one's my startup. probably not a good idea.

I find the 'unread messages count' to be extremely distracting when I'm trying to actually get real work done.

Through the corner of my eye, I'm constantly glancing and thinking: did it just increment?

Just keep your email closed until you get stuck on that hard problem, ha.

I use HTML based version (faster and less prone to JS glitches) and there's no gmail number in title.

You should give keyboard shortcut a try (require JS). This alone forces me to use JS in gmail.

there's also a gmail lab's feature to turn the unread email count off

Yeah, that's one of the most valuable tips I got from the whole GTD thing: stop your email client notifying you when new email arrives. Productive email is asynchronous.

Closing it down is best, but when I accidentally leave it open I still don't want the message count visible. In addition to enabling the Labs feature to turn off the inbox count in the web UI, I also have a one-line Greasemonkey script to remove it from the document/tab title.

I actually have a filter that marks all my incoming mail as "read" precisely to avoid this problem. It might seem heavy-handed, but this solution works even when working inside Gmail itself.

This just in: cloud services discover biff(1). Within a few years we should have an OS.

Sorry to be cynical, it pains me to see the whole state of computing thrown out the window everytime we reinvent new paradigms (none of which add substantial value).

Hint: we'll progress when we start building over old assets, not reinventing them at every "guerre de clocher".

It also pains me to see how the web has forced us back a decade in terms of what's an impressive UI feat.

When your hands are tied, undoing a knot becomes notable.

Appears to be based on this code: http://snipplr.com/view/29188/

EDIT: actually, it might or might not be based on it, but that code shows how to implement dynamic favicons, at least for Google Chrome.

Another edit: MikeCapone observed in another comment that it only goes up to "30+" so they might just be using 30 static images. But if so, why that wouldn't work in browsers other than Chrome 6+ and Firefox 2+ is beyond me.

Just guessing, but it's probably because most browsers heavily cache the favicon image.

Actually, I was just wondering whether this means that Chrome is no longer going to do so.

Surely it would be cached based on the image URL though, not based on the page URL, and different images could use different URLs. I still don't see how this would pose a problem.

Interesting... I like it, but it's entirely eclipsed by extensions like Google Mail Checker Plus[1], for me.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gffjhibehnempbke...

I prefer the favicon over the extra clutter of another icon.

depends how many accounts you've got. I'm checking 3 accounts so it saves having to have 3 pinned tabs open.

I've been using Better Gmail for Chrome to get this functionality: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gmfocnipihcoejdi...

There is also a Better Gmail extension for Firefox.

What I really want is something that can cause the icon to change when I get new chat messages. I frequently find myself unable to hear the soft incoming message sound, because I'm listening to something louder, and it would be nice to have a visual indicator.

I use this Greasemonkey script to do this. It works in Chrome and Firefox:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24430

It does the unread count thing, but it also toggles between it and the chat icon if you have unread chat messages. It's a must if you pin gmail tabs.

I've been using this script all day, and it's been great. Thank you so much.

What's the point? How many people actually keep fewer than 10k unread messages in their inbox?

I'm tidy. I don't have any. My wife on the other hand...

I think you either have 0 or 10K+.

I don't know how people can withstand that. At 1k+ messages you might as well declare email bankruptcy and regain a meaningful counter.

I've done this twice now. I'm sure there was some important stuff in my "Archive all unread emails" click, but I sure as hell wasn't going to check.

I have none. I have a complex series of filters which direct mailing lists, automated emails, etc into separate labels which bypass the inbox. If it makes it to my inbox, it's important enough to be read quickly -- this generally means only about 50-100 emails a day.

Wow. 50-100? I filter down to less than 10 a day. Either I'm much more aggressive with my filtering or you are far more of an important person than I am.

Multiple inboxes and filters are from Heaven. Pretty sure that my unread message count is directly related to how busy/crazy my life is at the moment.

If you use Priority Inbox it will show you the number of unread messages in that, not in your normal inbox.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/priority-inbox.html

I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I think there are quite a few of us who have at least a thousand unread messages. I have all kind of git commit messages that show up in my inbox that I don't always mark as read, not to mention all the mailing lists I subscribe to that aren't all in filters....

Commit messages and successful build/test messages automatically get set to read by a filter for me.

In addition to my normal commit and mailing filters, I set up one filter called "Non-direct" that's effectively "something that's not addressed directly to me and doesn't fall under any other filter." That means that the only things that show up in my inbox are emails directly relevant to me.

It turns out I only get around 5 personal e-mails a day out of the 100+ I actually get. Which could be read either way :).

I NEVER have more than 5 unread messages in my inbox. I have TONS that get filtered and archived to various labels but those are all mailing lists etc. But my inbox never has more than 5 unread messages and maybe 2-3 deal with soon messages.

Unless of course I go on vacation and then I have an hour or two to get back to NORMAL.

I user Gmail's "Priority In-box" feature and my priority section never has more than 5-10. Sometimes I let the other part get a little unruly when I am busy. I did use the option to add a section for "unread" messages before the rest of the mailbox.

How many people actually keep fewer than 10k unread messages in their inbox?

Most people.

If you have 10k+ unread messages, it's time to introduce some filters to mark them as read.

I currently have 9 emails in my Inbox total, and that's a lot for me.

It's great, I actually wanted this thing since I use pin tab all of the time for Gmail, but I dislike that it displays a number even if you have an empty inbox too.

I don't like seing a 0, it should have defaulted to the normal icon. I try to keep my inbox as short as possible and I label a lot so having an empty inbox is expected.

That's nice. A couple years ago I suggested that they should do that for the GMail link on the Google homepage:

http://michaelgr.com/2008/11/17/google-homepage-feature-requ...

I installed it and it just says 30+

I wish it went up to 99 at least. I get about 150 emails a day...

I have 100+. Not sure what the discrepancy is.

I tried reloading and I still have 30+. Strange.

Update: After a bit of usage of GMail it's been updated to 70+. Seems to be working now.

Huzzah, now I don't need this extension to do this for me. Rather off topic, but I really wish one day that gmail (@gmail.com and custom domains) supported multiple logins from the same window, I have Opera installed just for company email.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/access-two-gmail-accou... http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/send-mail-from-another... http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

I have three accounts in the same window, I can switch which one I use currently by clicking on the email address. Two of them are Google Apps accounts, and one is a Gmail account.

It doesn't seem to work for me, I can only use my gmail accounts, those using custom domains don't have mail "enabled" but if I login to them alone they work fine. Maybe it's a problem at my end then!

When did you sign up for the google apps account? I've seen this issue with new google apps accounts because google now has all google app accounts also set up as a regular google account for other google services. For example - before if you had a google apps account for your business, but wanted to use a service like google voice - you had to sign in to google voice with a separate google account. Now Google Apps allows you to use your custom domain to sign into all google services. I've seen this conflict in setting up newer Google Apps accounts for customers because the Google Apps account is treated as traditional Google Account. I'm sure there has to be some sort of work around for this.

They support it, although it is tricky to set up and it sometimes gets confused if you have to sign into ancillary Google services with your secondary account.

I am always signed into my personal account in one pinned tab and my apps account in another. The secret is in the gmail URL, specifically the /u/0/ in the URL. It turns out you can switch the number and be able to sign in multiple times. This may only work after you have enabled the multiple sign on that you can find with a quick search.

Lifehacker covered this fairly recently.

http://lifehacker.com/5733636/switch-between-multiple-gmail-...

I hate Google's multiple login behavior, so I just open an incognito window for my less frequently used accounts.

What do you hate about it? I like the idea, but I find it to be buggy and incomplete. Not all of the Google services work with it yet, mobile versions of their sites don't seem to support it at all, etc. If/when that's solved, I think it'll be an improvement over having multiple browsers open.

For instance, I'm normally logged into my personal account, which uses Mail, Voice, Calendar and more. To use Mail with my work account, my current account in every service is changed, so my Voice Chrome extension no longer shows correct data, as well as other weirdnesses that I've blocked from my memory since I started using incognito windows instead.

Number of starred items might be more useful.

Also, seems to be an issue - this number does not increase (from 0 to 1 in the test I did) when you 'mark as unread'. Tried to give feedback about this to gmail labs but couldn't.

I wish they would come out with a HTML5 Desktop Notifications lab feature.

They don't have a lab feature for HTML5 Desktop Notifications, but you can build extensions utilizing it. Here is one I built to show notifications for gmail chat messages:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/phokmbaffndjgejh...

Nice feature, but they'd better not show 0 when no unread messages.

That's exactly what they do. I'm not quite sure why you think it's such a bad idea though?

I don't know the grandparent's reasoning, but for me, having a small 0 there means I loose the peripheral vision effect of the icon. That little glowing "0" is hard to distinguish from another number in quick glance. If there were no icon then I could quickly determine the most important piece of information to me - do I have mail or not?

Screenshot of the "0" and "2" from two Gmail tabs I have open side by side:

http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/6883/20110126084559select...

I tend to keep my inbox fully read. It's my staging area - Unread = totally unprocessed, Read = TODO, Starred = Deferred TODO or important later. For me, a quick glance for unread (any amount) is more useful than exactly how many.

It's like having a sign that says "Nothing here".

Very handy feature to have, I had been keeping an eye on the pinned tabs - they flash/pulse when the page updates (new email comes in), now it's a lot easier.

It would be cool if we could interact with the app via the tab. Example: I'm in another tab and can right click the pinned Pandora tab to pause the music.