Working With Gmail’s New Compose

Today we launched an updated version of Streak that brings us to full compatibility with Gmail’s new compose feature that is being rolled out. Gmail’s new compose is great and we’re really proud of our integration.

Here’s Gmail’s new compose window without Streak

and here’s the compose window with Streak

You’ll see that we’ve added three new buttons at the bottom after the send button. These correspond to Send Later, Boxes and Snippets.

Send Later lets you schedule emails to be sent at a specific time. Outside of changing up the icon to make the button better integrated with the compose window, we’ve also made some slight tweaks to the feedback you get when you have a Send Later scheduled. Previously, once you scheduled a send later the compose window would disappear and you’d have to head back to your drafts to find it. With the new system we keep the compose window open and let you continue modifying the email as you see fit. Here’s what it looks like when you have a send later scheduled.

The Boxes button gives you the ability to file the new email that you’re sending out to a new or existing box. This is really convenient so you don’t have to go hunting in your sent mail folder and file emails from there. The major change we made here is how we render the box view when a compose window has a box associated with it. We spent a lot of time figuring out the best approach and we think you’ll like what we came up with.

You’ll see that we embed the box information in the compose window itself so we don’t take up extra valuable screen real estate. Now, we recognize that this can make the compose window itself a little cramped, especially if you want to go back and continue writing/editing a long email. That’s why we added the ability to show and hide the box information with that arrow icon in the top right.

Snippets is the last feature we have on the compose window and the functionality here is essentially the exact same as before. Clicking on the button lets you choose a snippet to insert, or you can get access to the snippet management window, or create a new snippet.

Keyboard controls

We’re big keyboard shortcut users internally at Streak so we made sure that our integration with Gmail’s new compose is fully keyboard shortcut enabled. Interacting with the buttons is handled how you’d expect as we insert ourselves into the natural order of tabbing. When a button is selected enter or space will open that button with the menus being fully keyboard enabled.

The one shortcut that would be difficult to discover on your own is getting in and out of the box information panel when a compose is associated with a box. To get into the box panel, first have one of the bottom toolbars (send, send later, boxes or snippets) have focus — but not active. Then press the “b” key. That’ll bring you over to the box pane where you can change the box stage, fill out the notes and enter in extra data all with your keyboard. To get out of the box pane back to the editor simply press the escape key.

Last thoughts

As always to get the latest version of Streak simply refresh your Gmail tab.

If you’re not in the preview yet, don’t worry, all the existing integrations work unchanged. If you’re on Gmail’s new compose try out the new integrations and let us know what you think!