Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gmail, We Need to Talk

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 247 posts

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#181

Post by vbit »

gdulli wrote: post #67
icebraining wrote: post #32

Earlier 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'm not a UX expert and don't have the vocabulary to describe what's wrong with it. What I know is that I used to enjoy using it. Not just for directions, but I'd use it for fun to explore new areas. And now I dislike and avoid using it altogether. Similar to Gmail. It's just feels like a mess of UI elements that show and hide and move dynamically, don't have fixed spots on the page, don't work consistently, etc. Lik…

I feel uncomfortable using maps these days too. Something about the dynamic moving and bouncing of elements when I'm just moving my mouse makes me insecure. I can't easily figure out where to find things.

I've started to use bing more recently.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#182

Post by icebraining »

d23 wrote: post #177
icebraining wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don't need to search. Open maps.google.com, then type the address and click on the arrow; it'll open the two directions input screen with the destination already filled in. Now you can just choose the origin (e.g. click on "my location") and it'll show you the route.

This is the problem. You can't argue a user into accepting that their experience is better. You have a whole swath of people saying maps has gotten significantly more cumbersome over the last few years. Telling the user they are wrong and giving them coping strategies to handle the UX awkwardness is just insulting.

I'm not even a Google employee, let alone a Gmail developer, so I don't see how is it insulting. I'm simply explaining why I don't see the problem being reported.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#183

Post by jkturbo »

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…

I'm the author of the article. All the other web mail clients from Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com, Comcast and so forth support the style tag. If it was a big security attack vector, all those clients wouldn't be doing that.

The other webmails rewrite ids and classes and prepend unique identifiers to prevent them from clashing with their own namespace (AOL is the only one that puts it in an iframe).

Interestingly Gmail webmail actually supports the style tag but strips out id and class selectors in them leaving element selectors - so they're actually doing some heavy duty parsing already.

As for it being an inherently text medium. I would say it depends on the recipient. Emails do not need to be web pages, but simple CSS styling can go a long way to ease readability in emails - especially in a long curated newsletter like Product Hunt.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#184

Post by jkturbo »

Shog9 wrote: post #65
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…

It's an opinion piece from a guy who... apparently... wants to put image carousels into emails and is upset that GMail doesn't let him, and yet dares to intrude upon his beautiful iOS. Hopefully no one exposes him to the ocean of old Outlook clients with crufty Word-based HTML renderers out there; he might die of a heart attack. Mentioning Pine/Alpine would be cruel as well.

Author here. Haha yes I write on experimental techniques like carousels mainly to get developers curious into the kinds of stuff they can do with just CSS.

I'm very aware of Outlook's backward HTML support, but at least its a single client. With Gmail, each of their clients has weird quirks that make it frustrating to code for.

As developers sometimes creating HTML emails are necessary, such as creating system generated reports for business users. Right now, the process is fraught with issues - including figuring out Outlook, so fixing this does not just benefit email marketers alone.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#185

Post by jkturbo »

ryan-c wrote: post #30
icebraining wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

I was aware of the proxying, but didn't realize that gmail always prefetched the image. This implies that even sending each recipient a unique image URL will not work?

Author here. Gmail does not prefetch the image. Appending a unique image URL will still allow the sender to know when you've opened the email. The proxy eliminates your IP as well as user-agent so the sender can't tell where you are and what you're using to read the email.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#186

Post by jkturbo »

smithkl42 wrote: post #40

Being the only coder at my startup, you have to do everything. And the other day, I had to spend the whole day troubleshooting rendering differences between Outlook and GMail. It reminds me of the old days, back around the time of IE6, when it was all-but-impossible to get FF and IE to render the same HTML - except worse, by at least an order of magnitude. It's astounding to me that the same companies who've worked t…

Author here. Glad to hear this from another developer. I think once developers are tasked to code an email, perhaps something as simple as a notification or a report, they'll quickly realize how truly foobar the email situation is.

Short emails may be fine with plain text, but once you need to present any sort of structure, HTML becomes necessary and there's no reason why email needs to be this difficult.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#187

Post by jkturbo »

zeckalpha wrote: post #129

> Gmail is the only email client that doesn’t support . And that's a problem? Please don't put CSS in your email.

Author here. The majority of non-personal emails contain some form of styling for readability. And the styling is done using CSS. The only issue with Gmail is that they force you to inline them which makes coding email very tedious.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#188

Post by dijit »

RawInfoSec wrote: post #175

It's email. SMTP. It's not instant messaging and it sure isn't a browser. Point blank, it's easy to see that this is by design and not by quirk or fault. If anything Google are looking to maintain usability by keeping as close to RFC spec as possible. One of the biggest problems facing email today is SPAM, and general deliverability. Once you veer far off spec it gets a lot more difficult to manage these two issues.…

>look how nice Greylisting worked in theory, until you realize that most IT or hosting companies don't have a clue how to configure an MTA within RFC specs and do silly things like retrying delivery every 5 mins.

that's what needs to happen for greylisting to work.

it's spambots that don't have the retry ability.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#189

Post by collyw »

rdtsc wrote: post #145
maxxxxx wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My old workplace!

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#190

Post by jinst8gmi »

CaptSpify wrote: post #41

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.

As someone who gets all my email hand-carved into stone tablets in ancient Greek I also don't see the problem.
Post reply on HN