Missing Chrome alert

Its been a long while that I am using Google Chrome, and I have made it my default, permanent browser.

So, like everyday I was using Chrome today and had opened multiple tabs. I wanted to close a tab and instead of pressing Alt + F4 for closing that particular tab, I pressed Crtl+F4 and entire window closed with all the tabs. One simple message or alert could have improved the User experience drastically - "Do you want to close all tabs?". Below are the screen shots of the alerts by IE7 and Firefox.

I tried to recover the closed tabs by opening Chrome again and looking for closed tabs in "recently closed tabs", by unfortunately couldn't find any information. I also tried to browse through the history, but it didn't help as the history is displayed according to the time you open the pages rather than the time you close the pages. Displaying the history according to the time you open the pages makes sense, but adding a small alert can improve the user experience. You can also read about similar missing alerts in Microsoft Outlook.

Alert Outlook..!!

Isn’t it ironical to see that widely used mail application among all the Corporations - MS Outlook doesn’t give a good User experience to the same target group…!!
The basic rule while sending mails in context with any official mail – “Write an Appropriate Subject”, doesn’t hold good for MS Outlook.
For every time, I send a mail without giving any subject line, it never alerts me. The same is applicable for a mail without any content.

For mails without a subject, the solution can be as simple as this: Display an alert, something like the following Pop-up (which I made in MS Paint :)) along with the message - “You are sending a mail without subject”. Since, we are also giving an option of not showing the dialog box again, it’s the user’s call to decide if user would like to see the alert again or not.

However, giving that option is again debatable – what in case of a naïve user, who by mistake clicks on this option unknowingly. Would he be able to change this alert back in the settings? Do you think you have any solution for this? :)

Anyways, coming back to our focus point: Alerts in Outlook
You might have noticed the below displayed alert in Gmail, whenever you tried sending a mail without a body. It shows a popup with the message “Sending this message without text in the body”. Don’t you think it would be really good to have something similar in MS Outlook as well?

This actually reminds me of the saying “Winners do not do different things, but they do things differently”. Something for Microsoft to learn from Google. :)

Thanks to Divya, for putting my thoughts into words.

Print random pages in Adobe Acrobat

In Abode Acrobat 7, the feature of printing the random pages was missing which they added in version 8. Compare the small change in "Pages" field in the pictures below which enhanced the feature.

Acrobat Reader 7 print window

Acrobat Reader 8 print window

It seems Abode and Google are tracking my blog and adding the posted missing features ;)

Finally Invisible mode on Gmail Chat

Last weekend I saw that Gmail Chat added invisible mode feature. It gives flexibility to the user to be in invisible/visible mode.

But this feature wasn’t added to Gtalk which is almost the replica of Gmail chat. So, if a user has logged in to Gtalk and Gmail chat simultaneously then Gmail chat doesn’t allow user to change the mode to invisible mode. I hope soon Google would add this feature to Gtalk also.

You can also read my earlier post written on invisible mode on Gtalk.