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by supersan 3886 days ago
I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects.

For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot".

It's something I wouldn't generally associate with a very corporate design but here they are wanting to add another silly feature and who knows how it will turn out? Maybe it will be super useful and then all the other companies will start to copy it.

But the thing is they're inventing new ways that really don't fit your product development roadmaps. I really like that about them.

7 comments

I had a similar thought with Apple -- El Cap has a feature where if you shake your mouse around, the cursor will momentarily grow in size so you can find where it is.

That does not feel like a top-down design idea, but a bottom-up feature designed by an engineer who was sick of those moments where he/she had lost the cursor.

Oh wow! That explains wierd artifacts I've been seeing since El Capitan, when using my trackball mouse. The cursor randomly grows in size, usually when I move it between screens quickly. I expect it's some "random jitter" in my using the trackball that causes it to happen.
Yeah, I thought I was losing my marbles until I saw someone mention it on HN...
Case in point why the OS is a terrible place to allow a hacky ethos.
Yes. Popping up a notification the first few times (or the first time after a few months of not using it) would be neat.
I seem to recall the Microsoft Mouse drivers for Windows 95 had a key shortcut to make lines radiate out of your cursor. Very useful on the low refresh rate LCDs where that cursor would appear like a submarine on the other side of the screen.
You can still do this (at least in Windows 7, the last time I checked.) Just look in the 'Mouse' section of your control panel, and select the one to make <Ctrl> radiate circles around your mouse :)
I can confirm it still works in Windows 8/8.1
also in 10. Didn't know about this feature. Thanks
It still has it, I use it because I lose my cursor on my dual monitors all the time.
I liked the "shroom mode" mouse option in one of the hack packs.

Trails, man....

And now I know what I'm using Resource Hacker for later on: changing "Pointer Trails" to "Shroom Mode". Thanks.
It’s still there – in windows itself even!
This feature is awesome, and super-discoverable. I didn't need to change my behaviour to discover it, or to use it. I just wiggle my finger like I used to, and it just works.
I liked this feature when I found it actually was a feature. For a while I thought it was my Razer mouse drivers messing up.
I love that feature.
While I'm sure some great hackers worked on Smart Reply, I don't think it's the result of the process you imagine. Smart Reply is using really sophisticated machine learning to advance one of Google's core goals, which is the creation of an AI and autonomous agents. A chatbot like the kind that finds a response to email is just the first shoe to drop.
> "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot".

Sure, if you use the word thinks. If you instead say "if msg.Contains "attach" then warn" it's not that impressive.

The feature in the article is a bit more than a single if.

I just tried sending "Attached is my photo". Then "I've been feeling less attached to you". One warns, the other doesn't. This is also more than a single if.
Note: GMail actually tells you exactly what it matched to when displaying the warning.
> sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot".

That one's not that hard.

http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=95685122323646&w=2

Doing it with a low false positive rate (so that you can enable it for everyone without being annoying) is much harder.

Also, Gmail has lots of users who speak languages other than English... has anyone tested whether the forgotten attachment detector works for them too?

Pretty sure it looks for the phrase "attach", it doesn't appear to be super sophisticated. Either way it works well.
It sure works for hungarian, as far as I remember it doesn't catch all synonyms of "attach".
It works in Japanese, though with more false positives than in English, I think.
Thunderbird does this as well.
And Outlook, for many years.
KMail doesn't really work fow many years now. Bu it used to do that too.

Now, I don't remember about pine and mutt. They probably didn't.

I like the attachment recommendation thing and it can be useful but what I find ridiculous is that they still have yet to recommend that you use the correct from address when sending an email to your work contacts. I have about 15 email address that I can send from. If any recipients are in the x.com domain and I am not sending it from my x.com account it should alert me. Better yet, it should just switch the from address for me. This feature has been requested for years now.
"Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot" is hardly unorthodox considering Outlook has had it for years. That said, the other experiments do seem very informal and fun.
I think the attach file reminder is now part of regular gmail.