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Gmail, We Need to Talk

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Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#121

Post by plusquamperfekt »

rdtsc wrote: post #116
rconti wrote: post #23

GMail, 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…

I see something like this happening: Imagine this: you are Google. Raking in billions. PhD level scientists are hired to mop floors, and serve coffee to everyone. You hire top level designers, pay them $250k/year and tell them to improve Gmail. And they do...Gmail gets better. You make more billions, hire more designers, pay them more and ... tell them to work on Gmail. You now have 10 designers, "designing" GMail. C…

I wish this observation would be confined to software - it's basically the most annoying - defining - aspect of capitalism. It's on one side the engineers and designers trying to do something for their own sake - and on the other side it's the constant encouragement to change something about a product to lure customers into purchasing the new "improved" version of ... the jeans, the car, the shoes - you name it.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#123

Post by avn2109 »

manigandham wrote: post #103
mfisher87 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my phone, if I type in the name of a store, it gives me the most popular store of that name in the United States instead of the nearest one, because I have wifi locaiton turned off. That's the only reason. If I turn it back on (I don't want it on), the results are sorted as expected. This is clearly an intentional anti-pattern, and it's been there for over two years. I have to actually type, for example: "Fry's el…

Are you using the actual native app or just the mobile website? If you have wifi off, it should still have access to your GPS to get your location, unless that is either off or blocked/unavailable. If the website then how would it know your location if you don't allow it?

There are several better failbacks than "most popular store in the US." Starting with "Store closest to the centroid of past N addresses that I have clicked."

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#124

Post by mschuster91 »

zaphar wrote: post #62

Allowing style to be included in a web based email client is just asking for trouble. It's not just hard . It's close to impossible thanks to CSS global nature. You would have to literally parse out the css and rewrite it as well as all the html content to automatically uniquely namespace it so it doesn't collide with the rest of your page. And meanwhile you've just created a new attack vector for your email service…

There's this thing called "iframes" with an attribute called "sandbox". And to prevent tracking or other cruft with images or external content, well, writing a CSS filter (url:... values) and filtering out src="" attributes in the HTML is not THAT hard.

There is no valid reason anymore for not iframe'ing your HTML emails any more. Browsers are consistent enough in rendering that you can achieve trivial cross-platform pixel perfection (font rendering aside).

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#125

Post by makomk »

manigandham wrote: post #103
mfisher87 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my phone, if I type in the name of a store, it gives me the most popular store of that name in the United States instead of the nearest one, because I have wifi locaiton turned off. That's the only reason. If I turn it back on (I don't want it on), the results are sorted as expected. This is clearly an intentional anti-pattern, and it's been there for over two years. I have to actually type, for example: "Fry's el…

Are you using the actual native app or just the mobile website? If you have wifi off, it should still have access to your GPS to get your location, unless that is either off or blocked/unavailable. If the website then how would it know your location if you don't allow it?

Google has very good geo-IP location detection, almost creepily good in some cases. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results on a desktop browser sometime and see for yourself.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#126

Post by Navarr »

davidbanham wrote: post #107
badloginagain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing emails are not the only ones that developers want to look not broken. To pick an instance at random: Confirmation emails for purchases made, especially if they have tickets as an attachments. If this email looks broken, customer thinks it's phishing or something, and might end up trashing it, just because styling is not supported consistently. And I take issue with your argument of "marketing emails are bad…

Why is that email using HTML? Hello there! Thanks for purchasing X for $Y. Your tax invoice is attached. Here's where you can track your delivery: http://example.com/tracking Thanks!

Because users hate additional steps.

Because you can't expect the email server/client to index the invoice for it's search database.

Probably other reasons

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#127

Post by coldpie »

potatolicious wrote: post #88
CamperBob2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is that Maps looks different at random times. I just took this screenshot to answer your post: http://i.imgur.com/SaHMCF2.png Yes, there's a round "Directions" icon. This time . Frequently, searches for a given address don't bring up that icon or any other UI affordance that indicates how I might get directions to the destination. However, Maps does reliably fill half the screen with photo…

> "Yes, there's a round "Directions" icon. This time. Frequently, searches for a given address don't bring up that icon or any other UI affordance that indicates how I might get directions to the destination." This is sadly a really common UX failure in a lot of different apps. One thing that many people still don't seem to realize is that it's more important to be consistent than being smart . I like to call these "…

My favorite example of this is deleting a draft in gmail. Go make a draft and try to delete it. There's no button to delete it. Unless you click the checkmark! Then the button appears where previously there was whitespace. Ugh.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#128

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

davidbanham wrote: post #107
badloginagain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing emails are not the only ones that developers want to look not broken. To pick an instance at random: Confirmation emails for purchases made, especially if they have tickets as an attachments. If this email looks broken, customer thinks it's phishing or something, and might end up trashing it, just because styling is not supported consistently. And I take issue with your argument of "marketing emails are bad…

Why is that email using HTML? Hello there! Thanks for purchasing X for $Y. Your tax invoice is attached. Here's where you can track your delivery: http://example.com/tracking Thanks!

HTML makes receipts more readable at-a-glance. You can emphasise more important information, format things into proper table columns, show an image of the item, etc.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#130

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

newjersey wrote: post #20
isido wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Sadly, plain text email seems to be endangered species. But perhaps there is still hope, markdown and pals have made some inroads as all around useful document formats.

I know this is an extreme but I like this extreme. When I say plain text, I mean plain-text. I mean not even markdown. Just plain text. The client can choose to make links clickable if they like. Any formatted document should come as an attachment (I'd prefer PDF). I guess it should be an attachment I expect or I probably wouldn't open it. In any case, I don't like emails with tracking. It feels forced. If you really…

How about RFC 1896 text/enriched?

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1896

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