PaulSpoerry.com

Gmail is probably one of the last Google services that adds a very simple feature: a contact picker. When you compose a message, you may want to see the list of contacts so you can select some of them. But this feature wasn’t available in Gmail, although you could find it in Google Docs, Google Calendar and in almost any mail client and webmail service. Some people even wondered if you can send messages to more than one address: questions like “Why can’t I load multiple contacts when I go to compose?” or “How do I compose using my address book?” were very popular in Gmail’s help group.

“Auto-complete is convenient and fast, and usually does the trick. But sometimes seeing your list of contacts can help you remember all the people you want to include on your email,” admits Google.

The wait is over and now you can finally use the contact picker in Gmail: just click on “To” when you compose a message, select the contacts and click “Done”.

Some of the cool things you can do using the contact picker:

* select contacts from one of your groups: just use the drop-down to choose from “Friends”, “Family”, “Coworkers” and other groups.

* easily remove the contacts you’ve picked by just clicking on them.

* manually add email addresses by clicking on an empty space from the picker’s “to” box.

* if you’ve already typed some addresses in the “to” box, the contact picker will include them when it launches.

* add all the results of a search by clicking on “Select all”.

* the feature also works for “cc” and “bcc”.

Now if they would just add this feature to Google Voice AND make it not happen in a popup (ugh… where’s the modal AJAX love Google?!) we’d be set.