31–40 of 172 posts
Obviously this is just one anecdote. But for me gmail is still the indispensable tool it always was. For all its shortcomings it is an amazing product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand. Most desktop email clients have _very_ limited customizability.
On the other hand, if you don't like one you can get any other that fits your bill.
I was so busy using gmail I barely noticed the transition. Which for me says everything. Great design shouldn't be noticed, it should just work. Obviously this is just one anecdote. But for me gmail is still the indispensable tool it always was. For all its shortcomings it is an amazing product.
Some things about the new design are defensible, however others are definitely not. My particular pet hate is that all the things that are not mail services (but you can still access within gmail) are splattered around all corners of the screen. Chat is in one corner (along with 'gadgets' - whatever they are). G+ is in the opposite. And in a third (behind a button that is very unhelpfully named 'gmail') are contacts and tasks. Where is the sense in that???
I was so busy using gmail I barely noticed the transition. Which for me says everything. Great design shouldn't be noticed, it should just work. Obviously this is just one anecdote. But for me gmail is still the indispensable tool it always was. For all its shortcomings it is an amazing product.
I'm finding this hard to believe. You didn't notice when the Send button went from the bottom of the message to the top? Maybe you meant that you noticed but didn't find it jarring enough to cause a lot of confusion?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm finding this hard to believe. You didn't notice when the Send button went from the bottom of the message to the top? Maybe you meant that you noticed but didn't find it jarring enough to cause a lot of confusion?
I'm finding it hard to believe that you down-voted me for expressing a personal observation. Even after I expressly pointed out that it was an anecdote.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html
Thanks, I know about the basic HTML site. It's not a worthwhile tradeoff for me, though. The basic site is literally worse than the 2003 version.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'm not sure I understand. Most desktop email clients have _very_ limited customizability.
You could argue that GMail has a higher customization potential given the fact that you can muck around with the document client-side (though Thunderbird extensions are similar, and if you really go down that road: I can also change the source code of KMail and recompile it), but we're talking in-app options here.
And so I find the notion that "GMail has impressive configurability because it has the options described in the article" amusing. Somehow the world has forgotten just how sophisticated an experience a regular old desktop app running in the context of a regular old desktop environment can be.
I'd also argue that regular old desktop toolkits and libraries still require a lot less investment of effort to achieve such levels of sophistication than the web development environment does at the moment. Like I said, thought-provoking.
My biggest new-Gmail-design pet-peeve is that the Display Density setting is only respected if your browser window is wide enough. I prefer the "Comfortable" setting. I have a 22" monitor at 1680x1050, but I don't have my browser window maximized (it only takes up 65-75% of the screen width). So, GMail has helpfully reduced my display density to "Cozy", ignoring my setting. As far as I know, there's no way to "fix" t…
I 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…