14 DAY TRIAL // Gmail is already one of the best examples of what a web app can do. And it’s getting better, one of the things the team has been working on recently is better desktop integration with a number of drag-and-drop features. Now they’re introducing a new one, probably the most important yet, the possibility to drag and drop attachments from received emails to your desktop. It only works in Google Chrome for now, but like with the rest of the drag-and-drop features, other browsers should be supported later on.
“Dragging and dropping files is an easy way to save time in Gmail. We’ve previously blogged about dragging files to upload as attachments and dragging images into new messages,” Adam de Boor, a software engineer at Gmail who has been working on drag-and-drop features, said.
“Now, if you're using Google Chrome, you can also drag attachments out of messages you receive to save them to your computer. Let’s say you have an email open containing an attachment. Hover your mouse over the attachment’s ‘Download’ link or its file icon and a tooltip appears that says: ‘Click to view OR drag to your desktop to save’,” he announced.
It’s easy to explain how the feature works, part of the reason why it was introduced in the first place. Just click and hold on the download link and then drag it to the location you want. Depending on the file size and the speed of your connection, everything should take just a few seconds. That’s all there is to it, it really is that simple. The only caveat is that it only works in Google Chrome for now. But support for Firefox and Safari should be on its way.
Gmail also got support for uploading attachments with drag-and-drop and also for inserting images into messages the same way. With this latest feature, drag-and-drop integration is pretty much complete; you can do in Gmail anything that you can with a regular desktop app. The next step is to expand the support to more browsers and to polish the rough edges.