Gmail announced a revamp of many important features yesterday. By taking suggestions from Gmail users, who now amount to over 176 million users monthly, many of the features that were labor-intensive have now been improved. According to the official Gmail blog, the revamped features are as follows:
- Sort by last name (look under "More actions")
- Keyboard shortcuts (go to Contacts and hit "?" for the full list)
- Custom labels for phone numbers and other fields
- The ability to undo changes you've just made
- Automatic saving
- Structured name fields, so you can adjust titles, suffixes, and other name components
Any user of Gmail should feel comfortable using the revamped features, and will not require a long adjustment period. Another new feature is a small tweak in the navigation area. Instead of the 'compose mail' being a link, it is now a button. The automatic saving feature is amazing, since you do not have to manually save drafts. I wonder if users of Google's 'Blogger' suggested this, since Blogger has employed automatic saving for years. There is no worse feeling than losing an important email or blog post (especially if it was really good or really important.) The contacts link has also been added to the navigation area. It used to be pretty difficult to find, and extremely dated.