and ballmer is telling us print is dead eh..

Funky logos for the product include fish and the Pinky and the Brain cartoon rats.

Good for them that those didnt see the light of the day.

That’s a lot of iterations for such a mediocre end result. The current version is still clunky and unintuitive…

Lot of smart people over there but somehting about their dev process is not producing good user experiences across their product line–excluding Search, and perhaps, Youtube(which doesnt count).

It’s really cool to see that a giant like Goolge struggles with the same problems and challenges as we do. My observation is that Google is not a user interface company , meaning they either keep it very simple (original Google search) or they have a hard time getting it right. Especially the confusing linkage between apps, accounts and services doesn’t help - but I guess that’s a trade off to their organic creation process which also has a lot of advantages.

Snoooooze. Thanks for the google puff piece!

I wish you were allowed to release the names and logos that they want kept hidden. I bet it`s quite interesting.

I still like the Gmail interface. Fast and simple, just how I like it.

Too bad you can’t see from that last screenshot how dog slow Gmail has been, lately. It’s still been the best damn free web mail I’ve ever used.

TechCrunch, please get some sort of image gallery system setup, looking at these images and those in other posts is tedious and slow.

With your resources you should have had something implented by now.

Blah blah blah.

Again, Y! and Hotmail both destroy GMail in numbers. We get it, you love Google. More puff pieces, right..

Image gallery? Please? Throw it up on any of the image hosting services?

I clicked on exactly two images although I -would- like to view all of them. Call me lazy if I don’t like jumping back in Internet time before image galleries.

ITS DEAD SLOWWWW for past couple of MONTHS!!!!!! PLS TELL THEM… I hate to see “Loading….” signs..

This is some geeky stuff alright.

Google has made a fortune out of Gmail and improving it will just make it even greater.

@Rykos - We’re looking into improving the image galleries, so stay tuned.

@Zebb - “With your resources” — ?

I’m intrigued by images 12 and 15:
http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/gmail12.jpg
http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/gmail15.jpg

I like how you can assign multiple stars to a thread, then keep a quick list of “3 Star Threads” on the left. I wonder why that didn’t last?

All I really learned from that series of images is that Gmail Labs, product manager Keith Coleman is _seriously_ cute.

I mean LOOK at the boy.

eww that ish wuz ugly back in the day. Now its aight. I love seeing stuff like this for some reason.

but yea google neeeds to work on UI

@Mark,
Your telling me TechCrunch doesn’t have the money and man power to go to the web, find a free image gallery app and drop it in so their article writers can post “Galleries” of images?

Great post, OP! Reps!

@Zebb - so why bring up resources…if you think it has nothing to do with resources?

ads_id=”horaciocs”;b=window.document;b.write(’Your browser does not support IFRAME’);

Btw, my gmail is going beyond 6GGB!

I’m considering resources to be money, people, skills etc.

I love Gmail. I’m looking forward to use the newly released beta-stuff

Very interesting look at the design process at Google. Gmail sure came a long way from most of these pictures before it was released… thank God.

So will gmail ever come out of beta?

@nemrut, you’re a fucking moron.

@12: How has Google made a fortune out of GMail? I hope to God you are kidding.

Congrats to the Gmail team for making by far the best email program available today.

and TC…I agree, use an embedded slide show please!

hey Mark, I agree. Let’s fix the way we do images.

Gmail has by far the best spam filtering out there. Yahoos filtering is horrible ;/

thanks google! a world of monkey and adversiting… :)
>> http://www.avidedesigner.com

lmao… i love how people (#7) come in a lay down the law… hehehe. “Dammit mike! You have a Porsche but no image gallery plugin??? WTF are your priorities!!” hehehe.

It’s called, use your own lightbox plugin Zebb, it’s not hard if you use FireFox to be able to view any image link on a webpage in a lightbox… much more exciting and fast.

I use gmail because it allows IMAP so I can use Mail on the mac to access it. I will take a desktop app over some web app every time, if it exists. But still, gmail UI is pretty good if you are stuck with the browser.

Gmail, made me a fan of Google.

I am surprised TC would even cover this - Everyone knows that GOOG’s UI are terribly clunky and unintuitive. Also agree with a previous poster - keeping the ‘beta’ tag on the product for 6 years is lame. They are supposed to be a world class, bleeding edge organization - Sh!t or get off the pot!

Is there anyone else who can’t stand the grouping of emails? I’d be a much happier gmail user if they gave us the option to view our inbox in the old fashioned linear/chronological manner.

gnu.org/software/mailman/

It looks like it came from GNU mailman interaction originally.

http://www.internetnews.com/xS.....hp/3487041

“All machines run on a stripped-down Linux kernel. The distribution is Red Hat”

Google was the first major company to pick up on Linux. I have a feeling they had one of the largest repositories of unreleased GUI front ends for known Linux software in the world by 2002.

Mike, Mark, I think you don’t really need to have any special gallery, a normal Lightbox should do the trick. And implementing it should take around five minutes, nothing more.

I used to hate conversation grouping. But I got used to it, and now I like it a lot. Particularly useful when you are trying to pull a bunch of useful information together. Only times it really sucks is if you send out a bunch of emails on the same day with the same subject line (for example “invoice”) to different people. All the responses wind up grouped in the same conversation. Awkward.

I also think Gmail is the best out of all the services at eliminating spam. I get very little spam compared to my old yahoo account which has been rendered unusable by spam infiltration. I’m lucky if I get one or two spam emails a day.

I started using Gmail in March of 2006. I currently have 36,814 emails in my inbbox, and am currently using 5.1 GB which is 30% of the 16.6 GB I am allowed. That’s pretty fricking amazing for a free service.

I believe the latest version of Wordpress - 2.5 - has image galleries built into it. Should be a snap.

@Techcrunch-Team

Some gallery might be useful, but more important is to use good file names.

Sometimes TC’s image file names (not that I’d be curious lol) are very silly.

You don’t work with different folders, right? They are all in one 500mb folder and have names like photoxy25.jpg, correct?

Just an example.. from Crunchbase… “thumb_scaled.IMGP8307.JPG”

*-*

But somehow.. it remembers me of my own image file names

…

Hi Mike,

Could you also please fix the “company index” page while you’re at it… it’s cool that you’ve profiled so many companies but that page is immensely slow to load and the organisation of it is very limited… galleries would also be cool.

Thanks for posting the GMail screenshots - The best & most useful service Google has created since building their search engine.

http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/gmail12.jpg - can we go back to this design, please?

That is all I was trying to say, a simple lightbox gallery would be good as anything, but something is certainly need with the amount of traffic this site gets.

Glad to see that Michael agrees

You’re on WordPress, so just install FancyZoom and everyone will be happy. Since you already post images as thumbs with links to the full version, FancyZoom is ready to roll.

http://www.wpelements.com/2008.....ancy-zoom/

More info and a sample:

http://www.mickmelseo.com/2008.....c-plug-in/

I have been using gMail for almost two years. Great product but ….

As with most Google offerings you don’t see big improvements once the product launches. While the labs thing is certainly fun it is not a substitute for doing the hard work needed to fully integrate the calendar and strengthen the contact management and make this a killer dashboard.

Something tells me that might require more than what can be done by some enthusiastic Googlers on their 20% fun time. Just a thought.

@25, Bryan Potts

..way to go, your comment is now archived and searchable for all yor future bosses–courtesy of google.

also, what kind of sissy spells Brian with a ‘y’..fudge-packer are we

безусловно это самая удобная почто
я думаю что она будет и дальше развиваться

For serious–that Keith Coleman is QUITE the looker.

The reprinted version of this story at the Washington Post looks a little silly without the screenshots.