Remember that maddening "Personalised" Start Menu option Microsoft introduced with Windows and Office that hides certain applications and items you didn’t use as often behind a chevron? Alas it looks like Gmail has been given a similar "feature" as of this afternoon.
When you browse to Gmail now, only a subset of your labels are shown, along with an option to change what’s visible. Fortunately this allowed me to painstakingly click "show" next to each one to display them all again. Neal from the IntoYourHead show seems to like this though, which leads me to think at the very least Google should have given us the option to disable/enable this function. Unless they don’t think we can handle such a thing. Grilled cheese sandwich irons have handles, and aside from the occasional blindingly painful liquid cheese scaldings I’m fine.
UPDATE: I’ve been told you can click the “Show All” link in the Settings→Labels screen to show all your labels again. Whew!
Normally I’m not this harsh (at least I hope I’m not!) but I was so vocally against this when Microsoft did it, and now Google is doing it with Gmail. I really hope this isn’t becoming a trend.
This also raises another issue with this whole Cloud Computing (or whatever the latest 1337 catchphrase is) concept: we don’t really have any control over these web apps.
On a slightly not related but also not unrelated note, has anyone got some sort of a vaccine that prevents family members from signing up for a Hotmail account when they first start to learn how to use a computer?
I blame the people who run beginnners’ courses.
Alas I know of a cure (telling them about other email services) but no vaccine. Same as MSN Messenger, even my sister hasn’t rid herself of that yet! I’m not worried that I’ll get infected by having others coughing Windows Live or Bing or MSN (or whatever they’re calling themselves now) as I’ve developed a tolerance, but I do worry for the safety and health of others.
Ruben, totally agree. This very same stupid feature is what motivated me to look it up in Google, and came up with your blog post.
I mean, I can understand the effort to “only show you the latest”, but if you’re gonna change the way I view things on my normal every day life, at least give me a quick link in order to disable it.
I’m actually happy I found the solution posted here, otherwise I would’ve had to write to Gmail Support.
Anyways … they should keep this kind of stuff on the Labs section, and never bring it out.
Cheers!
Seb.