Eeeeew. Janky.

More news on the GMail new labels functionality front.

First, here's the page where they give more info.

But I just tried something that really didn't work.  I got an email that I wanted to reply to.  So I hit the reply button and typed my reply.  I had just installed the Send & Archive button from Google Labs, so I figured I would use that.  But first I needed to label the thread.  

Conveniently, GMail repeats the button bar at the bottom of the email as well as the top.  So, rather than scroll up to the top to apply the label, then down to the bottom again to hit Send & Archive, I figured - cool, I can just use the Label button here at the bottom before I hit Send & Archive - no scrolling!

I hit the Label button and the "menu" popped up; or rather, like the original drop down box - because it ran out of room at the bottom - it "dropped up."  No problem.  But rather than scroll through the list of labels, I started to use auto-complete, and type my label in the box.  

And that's when all hell broke loose.  The "menu" dropped to below the button, briefly showed what I had typed, filtered the labels to correspond - and then disappeared.  The screen had shifted up - so half of my reply window was buried at the bottom.  And I lost my I-bar cursor.  All in like .5 seconds.

I figured it was because the list had run out of room at the bottom when it tried to filter, so I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the screen hoping to purchase a little more real estate, and tried it again.  Same thing.

So I hit 'l' to try to bring up the menu manually, only to find that, in fact, the "menu" was still there - the 'l' was the next character entered in the auto-complete box.   But it was way at the bottom of the screen, and the box was the only thing you could see - you couldn't see the filtered list of labels.  Sometimes, I would get the very first label in the list - but I knew there were others that should be there.  So I would grab the browser's slider to slide down and ...  the "menu" disappeared.

I tried a variety of ways, and found out that I could use the arrow keys to push the page down and see more of the list, but if I scrolled past the last, "create new" entry on the list - the screen sorta bounced....  I also found that if you clicked on some blank area and then hit 'l' to bring up the Label "menu," it took you to the top to draw the "menu" under the top button.

I gave up and scrolled to the top, selected my label, scrolled back down, and hit Send & Archive.

What I would have liked, and expected, was that - like the original drop down, which dropped "up" when it didn't have enough room to drop down - the "menu" would have stayed put when I started auto-complete, rather than trying to redraw itself under the labels button (or whatever it was doing) and totally reorienting the screen.  It basically scuttles what would have been some convenient functionality between the Label button (which appears at top and bottom of a thread) and the Send & Archive button (which only appears at the bottom of a compose/reply box), and instead creates a perplexed frustration. 

Some more thoughts on the labels "menu."  

1. I complained that, after hitting the Label button, if I wanted to use auto-complete, I had to remove my hands from the mouse, and start typing.  I would get a winnowed down list - which was cool.  Unless it brought up a unique label, I initially thought I then had to lift my hand off the keyboard to go back to the mouse and point and click in order to apply the correct label.  A nit - but it took away from the "smooth" feel of the previous More Actions drop down.  
   
   I soon discovered that - after using auto-complete to winnow down the list - I could use arrow keys to navigate to the one label I wanted, hit Enter, and apply the label.  So far so good.  
   
   But what if I wanted to apply multiple labels - which the new functionality makes provisions for with the check box?  The example I used was - I have multiple Friends labels: Friends/Bob, Friends/Charise, Friends/Dennis.  What if my email involved both Bob and Dennis, and I wanted to apply both labels?  Then I would have to do the awkward mouse-point-click-keyboard-type-type-mouse-point-click-point-click dance for a fairly simple thing.  I mean, using the keyboard is supposed to be faster - but I can't use the keyboard to its fullest.
   
   The reason?  I cannot use the arrow keys to select multiple labels.  Remember, you have to hit Enter, and Enter applies the label but closes the "menu."  In order to select multiple labels, I need to mouse click on their checkboxes.  It would be nice if, say, I could navigate to the label with the arrow keys and hit the space bar, which checks the box.  But I can't do that, because the I-cursor remains in the auto-complete box.  So if I hit space, not only does it not check the box, it inserts a space in my auto-complete "search."  And I don't have labels that start "fr " - so my list of choices gets winnowed down to nothing.  Not good.
   
   
2. There is something that is really cool about this functionality if you want to remove a label using the Labels button.  In most situations, it's likely more efficient just to click on the little 'x' to the right of the label, but if you're in the Labels "menu" and want to remove a label... the email's applied labels all appear at the top of the list, nicely checked.  In one operation, you can uncheck the label(s) that you want to remove, and then go and find the label(s) you want to add, and then hit Apply. 
   
   This is much better than the previous functionality, where you had to scroll all the way down to the bottom of More Actions to get to the Remove labels section.  And if you were removing multiple labels, you had to do it again, and again..... 
   
   I can see this being very useful when I erroneously label and archive something.  Previously, if I pulled up everything with that (bad) label, and removed the label first, well, it would sorta disappear into the ether.  I used to have to first label it with the correct label, hit the More Actions button again, scroll all the way to the bottom, and Remove the label.  Now, it's just a simple operation of checking and unchecking, in no particular order, and committing the changes when I hit the Apply link at the bottom of the "menu."

So final thoughts?  I am really growing to like this Label functionality.  (I doubt I will use the Move to button, and would really like a way to get rid of it.  Additionally, I think this functionality could be much better accomplished with a drag and drop, as it appears in most every other email program AND in Google Documents.)  There are some really nice things which, in general, are far superior to the way the old More Actions drop down worked.  I am quickly becoming enamored of the whole checkbox approach.  But the thing still needs work to really tighten up the functionality and make it consistently good.  It just doesn't feel like everything has been completely worked and thought out, and instead its potential is marred.  This wouldn't be a problem if it were, say, a Labs feature - I sort of expect that.  But the fact that this was treated as core functionality....  Well, I'm a little disgruntled ... and worried.