As someone who reads all of my email in a terminal: I don't see the problem here. I think gmail has a lot of issues, but making it harder for you to send me spam is not one of them.
Gmail, We Need to Talk
41–50 of 247 posts
Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maps has really become a chore to use, too. I remember getting directions used to be easy once and now it's like interacting with enterprise software.
What? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round button with an arrow and the label "Directions". How is it hard? EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
My beef with GMaps is its performance. The UI is for the most part fine (though there some awful blunders that were later fixed).
Loading GMaps takes forever now and brings my entire browser to a freezing stop (Chrome OSX) until it's done doing whatever it's doing. This is a modern desktop (i7, 16GB RAM, discrete graphics). Even after it's done "loading" if you try to interact with the map right away it does so at a crawl - inputs take multiple seconds to register and panning/zooming runs at about 2 frames a second.
It takes about 10-15 seconds after load for the site to be fully functional and performant. That's insane.
Ditto the Satellite view. Yeah, having 3D buildings is pretty cool and all, but the performance is atrocious on even fast, modern machines. If that's the tradeoff I'll take the 2D satellite imagery back please.
Overall interacting with GMaps is itself a chore, and it almost entirely comes down to bad performance. This is especially frustrating on mobile if you put the performance of GMaps on iOS next to competitors like Apple Maps - the rendering performance is insanely low even on the most up to date hardware like an iPhone 6s.
Beyond performance problems, one thing Google didn't fix until recently was that it was literally impossible to see information on an address/place and nearby transit at the same time. They changed Transit from a persistent overlay that can be toggled to a special view mode itself, which would disable itself the moment you clicked on any point of interest on the map. It makes me wonder if anyone on the Maps team lives in a major city.
Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk
#43I'm weird, I don't like all this HTML email.
What I _do_ like, is that when I get an email with things like flight details that my client can add it to the calendar.
if I have any complaint with gmail it's that they're too successful, running your own mail server that's standards compliant and runs all the DMARC/SPF/DKIM + PTR is fine, but until you have a reputation with gmail 70% of people aren't seeing email from you (and I'm not talking marketing emails).
which is self-fulfilling, because my emails go into the spam bin, which means when the spam bins get churned into the anti-spam learning engine it has, it sees that "(S)He's been marked spam before".
So it somehow centralises email, which is at it's core decentralised. :\
Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk
#44Media queries in email would allow a number of information leaks about how the email is being viewed, which I don't especially like. Allowing external images is already pretty awful.
Images are much less problematic for Gmail users since they started proxying them[1]. Now the sender can't tell if you opened the email by checking if the image was downloaded. [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail-...
Huh, I was going to argue that the User-Agent string would probably leak the same data as media queries, but if it's a generic proxy fetching them, then I guess not.
Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round button with an arrow and the label "Directions". How is it hard? EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
I have the same complaint. I can't explain how it has changed, but it used to be easy. Now it is difficult and error prone. I guess I just never paid attention to it when it was easy.
But why is it difficult and error prone now? I frankly cannot see it. What steps do you take, and where do you stumble?
Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maps has really become a chore to use, too. I remember getting directions used to be easy once and now it's like interacting with enterprise software.
What? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round button with an arrow and the label "Directions". How is it hard? EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
You used to be able to just click the directions tab and fill in the from and to in the textually-labelled boxes on the left. Now you have to provide it the incantation in the order it wants; in particular you must put the destination in first and then go back and put the start point after. I don't even know if you can do "via" any more, never mind how. And it seems incapable of remembering what mode of transport I want any more.
Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk
#47GMail, we need to talk. We need to talk about how substring searches do not work, 11 years after your launch. We need to talk about how you've slowly engineered out everything that was good and unique about GMail. We need to talk about how you "flattened" the style, removed colors from threaded messages, and just decided to use shades of grey everywhere. We need to talk about how difficult it is to tell one message f…
Maps has really become a chore to use, too. I remember getting directions used to be easy once and now it's like interacting with enterprise software.
Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round button with an arrow and the label "Directions". How is it hard? EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
My beef with GMaps is its performance. The UI is for the most part fine (though there some awful blunders that were later fixed). Loading GMaps takes forever now and brings my entire browser to a freezing stop (Chrome OSX) until it's done doing whatever it's doing. This is a modern desktop (i7, 16GB RAM, discrete graphics). Even after it's done "loading" if you try to interact with the map right away it does so at a…
Try Lite Mode: https://www.google.com/maps/?force=lite
Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round button with an arrow and the label "Directions". How is it hard? EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
My beef with GMaps is its performance. The UI is for the most part fine (though there some awful blunders that were later fixed). Loading GMaps takes forever now and brings my entire browser to a freezing stop (Chrome OSX) until it's done doing whatever it's doing. This is a modern desktop (i7, 16GB RAM, discrete graphics). Even after it's done "loading" if you try to interact with the map right away it does so at a…
[deleted]
Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round button with an arrow and the label "Directions". How is it hard? EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
You used to be able to just click the directions tab and fill in the from and to in the textually-labelled boxes on the left. Now you have to provide it the incantation in the order it wants; in particular you must put the destination in first and then go back and put the start point after. I don't even know if you can do "via" any more, never mind how. And it seems incapable of remembering what mode of transport I w…
You don't have to put the destination first: in the search box, there's a directions button, just press it and it'll show both boxes!
I'm with you on the "it forgets the transportation mode" complaint, by the way; even Google Now seems incapable of using it, despite being able to parrot back the setting in the config panel.