Google is at the forefront of machine learning. They have been doing it for a long time, and lately, they have taken it to a different level with new features rolled out across their various services.

For example, and you'd probably know, in Google Plus, now you can search pictures by the subject which can purely analyzes the data (without meta-data) and give you all the pictures of your cat.

I guess this new Inbox works in the same vein - I don't think it's just a big table of senders and their classifications - this seems to be more intelligent than that.

But it's okay to blindly criticize Google - in fact, it happens automatically if you are using a Macbook Air.

The already existing feature is more intelligent than "a big table of senders". For example, some of the emails I receive from Amazon are sent directly to me as notifications and some are filtered away into Promotions to be viewed on my schedule. It is smart enough to know that I don't want my day interrupted by Amazon's next sale but do want to see my order confirmations from Amazon as soon as they are received.

I am not criticizing Google, I am just noting that this is not a new feature but a Gmail labs experiment graduating into the main Gmail feature set with a fresh new coat of UI polish.

I would rather they just left it in labs.

Nowadays the corporations make all the choices for you. They know what's good for you, better than you do. Maybe.

Here are just 4 things that it breaks for me (note: copied from elsewhere):

1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.

2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?

3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.

4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.

Additionally, with this interface, it could be more integrated with hangouts and cross google's services (maybe easier send email pop up on andriod tablets?).

The "pop out" choice is a poor one since it turns Compose into 3 operations: Press compose, press the pop-out button, press maximize on the new window.

(as for the chat box, I use Minimalist, and my Gmail UI is trimmed of anything extraneous).

the problem with google launch for that feature is that they DID NOT give the choice.

So, people that is not slow and know how to use tabs effectively, got their writing space crippled. and it became a pain to actually see the email i wanted under the in-page-popup composer. because you know, some people have 10inch screens.

at least now they made it available to go back to the old format. ...that will give me a few more months to look to a gmail alternative.

The interesting truth is that Zenter was the first. I know because they demoed it to me in 2007 shortly before Google acquired them.

I'm guessing it's optimized for non-power users, but it should at least be customizable, or better yet learn which icons are most used and bring them to the main toolbar.

I don't think they would ever create anything without a decent reasoning behind it. May not be your reasoning, but there is one.

    (function showMenuInterval() {
         Array.prototype.forEach.apply(document.querySelectorAll('[aria-label="Insert more menu"]'), [function(menu) { menu.style.display='none'; }]);   
         Array.prototype.forEach.apply(document.querySelectorAll('.aZ > .wL.wM'), [function (menu) { menu.classList.add('wN'); menu.classList.remove('wM'); menu.style.width = '186px'; }]);
         setTimeout(showMenuInterval, 50);
    }());

So how about making the window sizeable, and remember the user's preference? And maybe when it's over a certain size the formatting bar gets permanent screen space.

Now if only there was a shortcut for 'reply/forward in new tab' or I could change the default size for cmd+r reply in new window or gmail remembered the dimensions I last resized the new window to.

I guess I like viewing messages in the context of a conversation, but not composing them that way. I just wish that I had the option of composing things separately.

C'est la vie.

As several people have pointed out there's actually a keyboard shortcut that does what I want ("d") I didn't know about, so now I'm at least slightly less grumpy about it.

As you might have guessed, I hate the new compose...

It's an unadulterated Gmail 1.0 html-only UI. Very 2004.

Personally, if I try to use it for more than 30 seconds I want to die. But YMMV.

I don't understand the negativity around change. If they never changed, people would complain that they are in a rut, that they don't innovate, etc.

To be clear, I would be fairly optimistic for the "new Inbox" if it weren't for the new GChat interface which worsened my user experience to add a feature, Google+ integration, I don't necessarily want.

Hotmail became Outlook.com a couple of months ago and it's quite nice actually :)

Nor do I agree that execution trumps ideas. Both are necessary and insufficient for success, but execution is far easier to commoditize. Those who can't judge good ideas from bad attribute everything to execution, of course. Those who can see the failure of the cult of execution all around. Even Google is abandoning 'see what sticks' in favor of Apple's ideas-directed approach.

What I see growing on HN "these days" is the notion that comments must be either positive or negative, and that they shouldn't be negative. I prefer comments, however imperfect, which strive for the truth.

How is it anti-useful? In which way does it hinder anything useful?

>2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse.

It is not. It is a buttonbar for selecting pre-categorized mails. It does nothing against email itself and doesn't change its usefuleness for discussions at all.

I'd love to hear you expand on this, because for me it seems like the exact opposite. By taking extraneous and superficial emails out of the main view, doesn't this make e-mail better suited for serious discourse?

Then there's automatic signature hiding, hiding of addressees, lack of support for constant-width typography, integration of bullshit from Plus (like insisting on autocompleting names from Plus rather than what's been previously sent and received), many facets of the new "compose experience", etc.

Google have made it clear they intend to be the McDonalds of software. Too bad... I used to be such a fan. But since they make ad-supported software, the McDonalds equilibrium was bound to obtain eventually.

>"Both [Execution and Ideas] are necessary and insufficient for success..."

Its more like idea * execution, where the range for each input (and the output, consequently) is [0,1].

Generally, yes, or at least "not better and usually worse."

But I said "more like idea * execution" -- compared to min(idea, execution) -- and the "more like" is important. Its not a strict mathematical relationship, and sometimes an imperfect implementation of an imperfect concept will end up better than either the implementation or the concept because it will be equivalent to a better implementation of a better concept by accident. But that's kind of exceptional case.

Might not be quite so linear though.

To abuse physics terminology, the units are different. In physics, a mass of "12 kg" is not in some sense greater than a force of "6 Newtons", even though the two are related by F = m * a. Similarly here, dragonwriter is defining "quality = idea * execution", so there's no reason to expect that the numerical value of this notion of quality should be directly comparable to the numerical value of either of its components. (Comparing the value of "quality" defined this way to the value of "idea" would require assuming some specific value for "execution" for the comparison to be sensible. If you just compare the numbers directly, you're assuming perfect 1.0 execution, which probably isn't what you intended.)

People can say what they want to say, at least within HN guidelines. It's not like these are YouTube comments. And I'm not sure about the almost universal belief in execution over idea either, or at least I'm happy to be one of your counterexamples. Can't both be important?

Finally, it's not like Google's proposal is equivalent to some kid's after-school project. Context matters, and in the latter case it would be quite unfair to trash it. If anything, people know that parts of Google read HN and hope somehow that their voices get heard.

It says in the post that this feature can be turned off.

I'm just going to stick with dear old yahoo mail and leave it at that. Its might be old, even stagnant, but it is simple, clear, functional and causes me zero grief. As it has done for 15 odd years.