Gmail’s just received a small but nifty update: If you’re using Chrome, you can now drag attachments from emails and drop them onto your desktop to save them.
Open an email with an attachment and hover your mouse pointer over the attachment’s icon — you should see a tooltip that says “Click to view OR drag to your desktop to save”. Simply drag the file to where you’d like to save it (to your desktop or anywhere on your file system). Saving larger files may bring up a progress bar.
This is a fairly minor change, but along with with some other recent updates (like the ability to drag and drop files onto emails to attach them, and to drag and drop images into emails), helps to make Gmail feel much more like desktop email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird. This update is currently only available in Chrome; I expect that Firefox and Safari support will follow shortly.
(Note: I’ve tested this successfully on both Windows and Mac, though I had to re-start Chrome on my Mac to get it to work).
What other desktop app-like abilities would you like to see in Gmail?
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d): HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps
I guess there are all types of nice features that you must care for when creating an operating system based on a browser.
May as well add them right into the browser.
[...] Gmail Update: Drag Attachments to the Desktop to Save Them [...]
[...] Drag-and-drop file handling. Wave allowed you to drag files and images and drop them right into your Wave, providing a much more intuitive, desktop app-like way of handling files than web apps traditionally allow. Thanks to HTML5, we’re already starting to see this kind of functionality popping up in other tools, like Gmail. [...]
Only thing I’m missing now (badly) is being able to paste in screenshots directly into the mail.
[...] Handy new update within Gmail for drag-and-dropping attachments. Discussed @ this link: http://webworkerdaily.com/2010/08/04…-to-save-them/ Also new to Gmail is the capability to have (2) Gmail accounts open in one browser… [...]