14 DAY TRIAL // Gmail is introducing a new way of interacting with your email messages that is both faster and more intuitive. It's adding new "quick action buttons," which bring more functionality to the email client.
"From holiday shopping and booking flights home to dinners out with friends and family, life gets busy this time of year. The last thing you need to spend your time doing is digging through an email for relevant information, such as links for tracking packages or flight check-ins," Google writes.
"Gmail’s quick action buttons help you stay on top of your busy schedule by surfacing important information as 'buttons' that appear in your inbox, and now, you'll see even more buttons to get you through this action-packed season," it explains.
Google has added a bunch of new actions to the lineup. You can now review or rate a restaurant straight from the inbox. You can change your OpenTable reservation or save Google Offer deals.
But that's not all, emails with a video link will get a "View video" button, which will open it in a new tab. The same goes for files and folders shared from Dropbox or Google drive. Google Docs documents get a button as well.
There's already a long list of supported actions and Google is adding more. Developers interested in getting a button for their apps and sites can simply make some small modifications, i.e. add some markup to their messages.
The whole point of these quick action buttons is not to have to open an email to do something. Many times, we already know what's inside just from the title or even just the sender.
Rather than having to click a few more links and wait a few more seconds to get to what we want, the buttons make it possible to jump straight to what we intended to do.
