Finally after 5 years of launching the Google mail ie gmail, Google has added a contact chooser. This was a real necessity for many people including our-self.
It was one of the most sorely-missing features in what is otherwise the best email service, by far. For some reason, since its launch in April 2004, Gmail has never had an option for a pop-up window to choose contacts that you want to send an email to. This article was initially published in thinkdigit.com.
Well, that has now changed as the service has finally added a contact-chooser for its users. In a post on the official Google blog, Benjamin Grol, Product Manager (Gmail), wrote:
“When composing messages, you probably rely pretty heavily on auto-complete to add recipients. Auto-complete is convenient and fast, and usually does the trick. But sometimes seeing your list of contacts can help you remember all the people you want to include on your email.
“So, we’ve added a contact chooser to Gmail. Click the “To:” link (or Cc:/Bcc:) when composing a message and you’ll see something like this:
“You can click on the contacts you want to add or search for others.
“If you use contact groups, your groups will appear in a drop-down menu in the contact chooser, so you can select contacts from the groups you’ve already created. And if you happen to use Gmail in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, being able to pick from your list of contacts should be particularly useful since auto-complete doesn’t offer the same search as you type experience that it does in other languages.”
Lifehacker lists the uses of the new service, noting: “Most convenient of all is the search function in the contact chooser, and the ability to select all the results that come up from a particular search. That makes it easy to, say, pick everyone you know from the Rochester Institute of Technology by searching rit.edu and picking everyone who comes up.”
However, all is not well with the new contact chooser. “The big irk that some are noting is that Gmail’s contact chooser opens in a new window, confounding Firefox users that have relegated new windows to tabs, and forcing those with pop-up blockers to set them to allow Gmail’s chooser through,” Lifehacker says.
