How to cope with the Gmail redesign
jasoncrawford.org
How to cope with the Gmail redesign
1–10 of 172 posts
Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign
#2Personally I really like the new design, despite the fact I have actually implemented most of the things mentioned in the article. However, I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this level of customisation, and this doesn't include any of the stuff from the labs feature set.
Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign
#3You can talk IMAP/POP and SMTP, and you get to control your own user interface, or you can talk HTTP, HTML, and JS and abdicate control to someone else. I fell into that trap myself. I was a heavy user of Gmail for about four years, and when they started changing things and told me "only 0.07% of users use that feature we just removed", it was too late.
This mayhem ruined "the cloud" for me ... and I used to help run parts of it. Blah.
Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign
#4I am absolutely furious how my account was forced today to the new theme - it's hideous.
I've tried several stylish options to no avail, I miss the old dark layout with high contrast buttons.
Even the dark theme has a bright white message pane for no reason.
It also runs very sluggishly compared to the old UI, not sure why.
Well this should give me the kick in the pants to get off gmail anyway.
Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign
#5You can talk IMAP/POP and SMTP, and you get to control your own user interface, or you can talk HTTP, HTML, and JS and abdicate control to someone else. I fell into that trap myself. I was a heavy user of Gmail for about four years, and when they started changing things and told me "only 0.07% of users use that feature we just removed", it was too late. This mayhem ruined "the cloud" for me ... and I used to help run…
What UI do you use?
I probably going to use newest Thunderbird when I leave gmail.
Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign
#6besides the default theme and the high contrast theme, all others are useless and look like the work of a 5 year old. Design has a function, namely to make things clear and give the user a good experience.
Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign
#7Personally I really like the new design, despite the fact I have actually implemented most of the things mentioned in the article. However, I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this level of customisation, and this doesn't include any of the stuff from the labs feature set.
> I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this level of customisation
That made me chuckle, using a desktop email app. Funny/curious/thought-provoking how different standards apply to web apps still.
Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign
#8I HATE HATE HATE the new design! I was dreading the day they took away the old look, but these tips go a long way to making gmail usable for me again. Thanks!
Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign
#9I ended up leaving Gmail a few months ago (knowing this was coming). The new design works really poorly with browser zoom. I need to view the page zoomed in to 300% or so most of the time (I don't have good vision). Zooming really worked pretty well on all of the past iterations, up until this one. There are a number of panes that stay visible when scrolling, so the content area on the web page becomes really really small. (I'm not usually one to complain just because things changed, I didn't like the mystery meat icons either, but I can get over something trivial like that.) It just doesn't work.
I couldn't really figure out where else to go, but OWA 2010 doesn't have these problems, so I went to Office 365 for my own domain (and forwarded Gmail). I never thought I'd pay for email but considering how vital mail is, having real support is a nice piece of mind.
I remember how awesome webmail seemed in 2003 (when I switched from Outlook to Gmail), but now that I've gone back to Outlook, I see all the awesome stuff that I was missing. This is really not to credit Outlook though, I'm sure Gmail (threading) influenced them greatly in the past 8 years. I know you can just use Outlook+Gmail, but sadly IMAP isn't nearly as good as Exchange.
Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign
#10I am absolutely furious how my account was forced today to the new theme - it's hideous. I've tried several stylish options to no avail, I miss the old dark layout with high contrast buttons. Even the dark theme has a bright white message pane for no reason. It also runs very sluggishly compared to the old UI, not sure why. Well this should give me the kick in the pants to get off gmail anyway.
It's slow because all the UI elements in the new themes have alpha transparency and rounded corners. It increases the amount of work your browser has to do to paint it tremendously (though GPU acceleration will help).