What’s new in Gmail’s interface

This morning I logged in to my Gmail account, like I do everyday, but I noticed something different. Yeah, Gmail’s interface has been slightly redesigned to make it a bit friendlier and easier to use.

The first thing that caught my eye is that now Mail, Contacts and Tasks have been separated from the rest of links on the left sidebar, and moved upwards. The Compose mail function is now a button, rather than just a text link that was sometimes hard to find.  Also, the different options to select messages (All, None, Read, Unread, Starred and Unstarred) are now neatly organized in a drop-down men, besides the Archive button.

But the main changes are found in Contacts, where the Google team have added a bunch of new features. You can now use in Contacts the same keyboard shortcuts that work for Mail, sort contacts by last name (you’ll find the option under the More Actions menu) and create and edit contacts more easily thanks to the Undo and Automatic saving functions.

Each contact has a complete entry with support for custom labels, which makes it possible to use various phones, addresses or emails under the same contact, but also create any other field you may need.

Contacts are now easier to manage and organize. The Merge contacts option under the More actions menu lets you merge two or more selected contacts, while the Find and merge duplicates option automatically creates a list of possible contacts to merge for you.