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

231–240 of 247 posts

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#231

Post by j_s »

porker wrote: post #213
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…

> 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 clie…

Joel Spolsky called it 'Fire and Motion'.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#232

Post by maxxxxx »

signal11 wrote: post #209
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.

> 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…

No doubt that Windows 7 or 10 are much more stable. They could have achieved that without making massive changes to the UI. My point was more about the UI capabilities. the general capabilities visible to a user haven't changed much between Windows 2000 and Windows 10 but they have made massive UI changes at least 4 times requiring the user to re-learn how to do the same thing.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#233

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

newjersey wrote: post #169
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about RFC 1896 text/enriched? http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1896

While rich/styled text would be useful in many situations, I'd rather strive for simplicity. With Unicode, plain text is already complicated as it is and the diversity in email client software means that plain-text is probably our best bet. As far as I know, most office emails are pretty much like text messages anyways. Also, it is possible to leave stylistic/visual cues in a plain-text email such as Important (: Not…

Attachments are just a differently tagged MIME part.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#234

Post by maxxxxx »

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.

Another example: Visual Studio

Version 2008 looked good, was really nice to use, easily customizable

From 2010 on it turned into a gray, depressing mess with less features (toolbar buttons almost indistinguishable from each other, no macros, toolbars can't be customized by just dragging things) .

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#235

Post by Gmo »

LukeB_UK wrote: post #48
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…

Try Lite Mode: https://www.google.com/maps/?force=lite

THANK YOU !

I so much hate the "new" google maps ... anybody has a alternative ? Somehow, I like the tiles of google maps best :-/

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#236

Post by newjersey »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #233
newjersey wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While rich/styled text would be useful in many situations, I'd rather strive for simplicity. With Unicode, plain text is already complicated as it is and the diversity in email client software means that plain-text is probably our best bet. As far as I know, most office emails are pretty much like text messages anyways. Also, it is possible to leave stylistic/visual cues in a plain-text email such as Important (: Not…

Attachments are just a differently tagged MIME part.

I was not aware of that. Sorry. I just meant that if we want to send a document that should look exactly as we send it, perhaps we should consider sending a PDF document or something.

Something I found interesting in the Wikipedia MIME article is:

> Text in character sets other than ASCII

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME

If I so much as write க in Tamil, I rely on MIME. (Sorry if this is obvious to readers. I am not an email expert.) For others like me, the Wikipedia article on email spells it out:

> Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multi-media content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, has been standardized, but not yet widely adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

Sorry for going off on a tangent. I appreciate your reply as I learned something new today. (:

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#237

Post by brianclements »

porker wrote: post #213
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…

> 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 clie…

I've referred to it in conversations as movement vs progress: things that progress you forward toward a goal, or simply movement which could be in circles, backwards, side to side, hand waving etc.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#238

Post by depsypher »

porker wrote: post #213
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…

> 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 clie…

The "get rid of the duck" story comes to mind: http://pud.com/post/59851751577/the-duck-technique

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#239

Post by CaptSpify »

jinst8gmi wrote: post #190
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.

You say that like a terminal is a step back. I see it as the opposite: I started with email in web-based systems. Terminals improved my email experience 100-fold

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#240

Post by Gustomaximus »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #224
Gustomaximus wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Here maps. This is the old Nokia maps now owned by Android. I use this as my go-to for driving. It's much better interface and route selection is as good as Maps. Also I love the GPS speedo and speed warning. I tend to use Maps for location based searches like restaurants for the better reviews.

HERE is pretty great. I've been amazed how basic things like a list of recent searches (something that can be easily stored locally on your device) aren't even available on Google Maps if you turn their cloud location stalking off. Whereas HERE provides a pretty functionally useful app without me even having an account with them.

Maps holds my recent searches. Even shows cross device searches. Perhaps that's cause I have Google Now and/or Chrome sync set-up?
Post reply on HN