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Gmail, We Need to Talk

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Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#141

Post by fish55 »

plusquamperfekt wrote: post #121
rdtsc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is an accompanying ideology that regards a proliferation of choices as an emerging consequence of greater multiculturalism/individuality. This is a very convenient analysis for market apologists, and more importantly, it puts off a kind of anxiety-filled absolute reckoning of reason and utility in our decision making. If we were more rational we would likely have to confront an essential emptiness...or maybe that's just how it seems to those of us embedded in the prevailing values.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#142

Post by maxxxxx »

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…

That's my theory too. It seems a lot of software has peaked a few years ago and gone downhill from there:

- MS Office peaked around 2000 - Gmail 3 years ago? - GMaps 3 years ago? - I would argue Windows peaked somewhere between 2000 and XP

The same applies to managers. When an organization works well, they have the need to change things around just because.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#143

Post by CamperBob2 »

mattm wrote: post #132
CamperBob2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative Another way of phrasing your mother's advice: "What if everybody did X?"

This argument never holds up. Being a doctor or an engineer is almost always thought of as a good path. But what if everyone was a doctor or engineer? There'd be no one left to do basic tasks in life and the positions available for doctors and engineers would be so in demand that these people would work for very little.

Your point can be rephrased as, "What if everyone ignored the realities of the job market?" There's no danger that everyone will do that, so there's no need to use ethical or other philosophical arguments to discourage it.

On the other hand, spamming or otherwise misusing email to deliver your unsolicited "message" at everyone else's expense is a classic instance of the Tragedy of the Commons. There is no incentive for any individual actor to do the right thing. Kant's categorical imperative is one of several reasonable ways to think about it.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#144

Post by Animats »

Why use Gmail when IMAP will sync all your devices? Android has a good IMAP client. On desktops, use Thunderbird. What value does GMail add? Besides ads, of course. And Google building a profile of you.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#145

Post by rdtsc »

maxxxxx wrote: post #142
rdtsc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's my theory too. It seems a lot of software has peaked a few years ago and gone downhill from there: - MS Office peaked around 2000 - Gmail 3 years ago? - GMaps 3 years ago? - I would argue Windows peaked somewhere between 2000 and XP The same applies to managers. When an organization works well, they have the need to change things around just because.

Interesting point on managers. Yeah I've seen that happen. They are highly paid, engineering team is smart, small and self reliant, So management doesn't have much to do. But that doesn't mean they won't do much. So they throw themselves full on into "process", "communication", "meetings", new agile workflow, reorganizing the team, implement new metrics etc, etc.

A lot of it makes sense from the point of view of end of year reviews. They have to say they did "something" to justify pay raises and bonuses. The sad part is that a lot of times that busy works makes everything worse.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#146

Post by terinjokes »

manigandham wrote: post #101
softbuilder wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe GMaps is just polarizing software that seems awesome to some people and awful to others? Unless you're a Googler and/or on the Maps team? :) One thing that is absolutely brain-dead is that (in Chrome) I can't type in maps.google.com and tab-search for my address. I can do this with Amazon.com or Netflix, but not an actual Google property? Weird. Another thing that is just bafflingly absent is that GMaps doesn't…

Home/Work are supported, you can easily set them if it doesn't learn on it's own: https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3273402?hl=en Also I'm not sure but it would seem you have some kind of plugin that might be interfering as GMaps is very smooth on Mac Chrome and Safari. And you might be single-clicking on the maps which brings up a gray marker to show you more detail of the nearest address to where you clicked. I…

I frequently, in Chrome on OSX, get Google Maps in such a state that attempting to interact with the map at all will cause it to "freak out" and randomly zoom or pan somewhere unexpected.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#147

Post by scintill76 »

icebraining wrote: post #55
scintill76 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a server-side proxy, no user-agent except whatever the Gmail devs set :)

Yeah, I guess it could reveal which interface you're using or something, but it is probably static and doesn't reveal anything except maybe that it's Gmail's auto-fetcher.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#148

Post by btilly »

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…

For the first few years that I used gmail, I was set up to use plain text with the terminal theme. Why? It was the only theme that I could find that had a fixed width font, and I read enough emails with cut and pasted code that I wanted a fixed width font.

They took that option away from me in 2011. No, I don't care about a picture. All I wanted was fixed width font, and plain text. Yes, I could apply style sheets to read plain text, and they would eventually break them for me. I'm not bothering with an uphill battle to get it back. I'm just moving on.

Oh, and about rich text? If I happen to be cutting and pasting something that was bold over here, I usually don't want it bold in my email! In fact I've wanted that approximately 0 times in my life. And it is a very good approximation.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#149

Post by defen »

chris_va wrote: post #47
gdulli wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

https://www.google.com/maps/lite

I tried loading that on my system (latest Firefox, OS X Yosemite) - this is what I get: http://i.imgur.com/8IrwRAF.png

All adblockers turned off, no errors in JS console, no other extensions installed, regular maps works fine.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#150

Post by mhartl »

thieving_magpie wrote: post #29

techcrunch, we need to talk about your article titles. Addressing the content of the article: - "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email", I can't think of any developer I know that shuns email, and they all pretty much use gmail. - "How Gmail Breaks Email", to be frank... not even in the slightest. Sure, it sounds pretty annoying having to jump through all those hoops for a fancypants email. - "Google should take the lead…

"Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email", I can't think of any developer I know that shuns email, and they all pretty much use gmail.

I think you've misinterpreted the phrase "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email". TechCrunch writes:

Gmail and its plethora of rendering quirks is a big reason why developers avoid working on email.

This suggests that developers shun email clients as a development platform (i.e., working on email), not that developers don't use email themselves.

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