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Gmail, We Need to Talk

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Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#211

Post by lmm »

ryukafalz wrote: post #85
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…

>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. I'm assuming you do have GPS location turned on, and that you're allowing location access on that page and waiting for a GPS lock b…

Maps used to be much better at searching within the area I'd already focused on. Now whenever I search it seems to either search near my current location or zoom out and search my whole city. It makes it very hard to e.g. look for a bank branch on my route home from work.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#212

Post by chinathrow »

napoleond wrote: post #114
PhilWright wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending unsolicited email to public addresses in order to sell something is spam. Calling it 'cold email' to make it sound like a legitimate process does not change the fact you are spamming.

That's not true, by either the letter of the law or the spirit of it. I own a business, and I post my email publicly because I want people to contact me . Some of those people will be selling me things--I want that! It's true that I end up with a lot of spam as a result, and that sucks, but it's better than never receiving unsolicited business email. Sending unsolicited email to consumers is, indeed, spam. B2B is dif…

From that post - a gem:

"Just to be clear, you’re not allowed to use Customer.io to send cold emails.."

Guess why :)

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#213

Post by porker »

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…

> Nobody will want to say "Yeah, GMail is actually great so I left it alone and didin't muck with it, can I have my raise?"

Does this incessant desire for change/to be seen to be doing something have a name?

It came up in a political commentary I was reading (about how politicians have to be seen to do something, even if the status quo is better), and I've noticed it in the "curve of website disillusionment" for clients ("Our website is 3 years old ergo a new shiny one will be much better. No, we didn't do any research but it's obvious 'cause it's old")

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#214

Post by cbr »

btilly wrote: post #148
newjersey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

    If I happen to be cutting and pasting something that was
    bold over here, I usually don't want it bold in my email!
Ctrl+Shift+V

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#215

Post by porker »

lmm wrote: post #211
ryukafalz wrote: post #85

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. I'm assuming you do have GPS location turned on, and that you're allowing location access on that page and waiting for a GPS lock b…

Maps used to be much better at searching within the area I'd already focused on. Now whenever I search it seems to either search near my current location or zoom out and search my whole city. It makes it very hard to e.g. look for a bank branch on my route home from work.

This 100x. I don't get it: if I've zoomed in the map or panned, and then make a search -- why isn't it obvious that I want the store closest to the area I'm looking at, and not one 30 miles away?

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#216

Post by xg15 »

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.

I agree. I think to a certain extent, this curve has always been the case. However, in the old days, you as a customer had an easy choice to keep your particular piece of software at the top part: Just don't use the newer version. Of course now, thanks to the "cloud everywhere" mentality and the agressive push for auto-updates that seems less and less possible.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#218

Post by slavik81 »

Nullabillity wrote: post #210
signal11 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows peaked somewhere between 2000 and XP Uh, Windows 2000 was good on supported hardware but had really poor support for typical consumer PCs. XP was a security nightmare, although XP SP2 did improve things. Hardly a "peak". Newer versions of Windows, with malware protection enabled by default, do a much better job of protecting customers. The big win for me is that somewhere between Windows 7 and 10 (not sure…

> The big win for me is that somewhere between Windows 7 and 10 (not sure when), Microsoft added a feature so that the OS wouldn't bluescreen if the display driver crashed -- it would fall back to its "basic", Microsoft-written driver, and try to restart the actual driver. This is just one example but imho Windows actually become more reliable over the years. Pretty sure that happened in Vista, actually.

My brother actually managed to play through a good portion of Bioshock on Windows Vista with a broken graphics card that faulted every couple minutes. The screen would just flicker black for a fraction of a second as Windows restarted the driver. I was rather impressed.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#219

Post by iainmerrick »

manigandham wrote: post #106
potatolicious wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On a puny Macbook Air with 4gb ram and Chrome with 30 tabs open I'm getting perfect framerates and instantaneous UI... perhaps this is something local to your machine? It's hard to imagine that Google would make a UI that slow given their extensive optimizations.

It's true! Google Maps is really fast on some computers and impossibly slow on others. The only fix is "Lite Mode" as mentioned above, and unfortunately there's no link for that on the main page.

They aren't testing their cool WebGL version widely enough, so it fails badly for many users. (Edit: or wait, is it just a 2D ? Either way, it should be fast in Safari and it's not.)

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#220

Post by rathish_g »

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.

Yes. Why a common man want css in their email? The so called "developers" in the article are actually spammers!

We moved to gmail to escape from spam not to get more spam.

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