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One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

iamnotaprogrammer.com

41–50 of 87 posts

Re: One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

#41
It lasted until morning, before I deleted it. While I like the UI to look at, it's not conducive to getting things done.

And I made the mistake of enabling push notifications - only to find my phone covered in notifications when I woke up - I know Google don't really have a better way of doing this due to iOS... but it does beg the question why bother, when you can't better what is already available?

Re: One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

#42
post #11

Disagree. The reason that Gmail for iOS and Gmail in general suck is the total lack of support for cryptography within the application (S/MIME, PGP, or other solutions). As a friend of mine said, "Gmail -- a private conversation between you, me, and 25,000 SREs."

Funny, but not necessarily true. Poking around in someone's personal data is a really, REALLY good way to get fired immediately.

Only way to have a truly private conversation is in person...maybe on a boat...a little bit off shore...with the motor idling :)

Re: One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

#44
post #24

Google, I have the solution. Step 1: Checkout the Sparrow source code Step 2: Find and Replace All on the word "Sparrow" and change it to "Gmail" Step 3: Add push notifications. Compile and send to the app store.

I dunno about that - I really wanted to like Sparrow for iOS (aside from a couple bugs dealing with insane volumes of email, I love it on the desktop) but it never felt quite right to me. I've actually just now reinstalled it to check what bothered me so much, and it's the same issue I have with the new Gmail app: swipe-to-archive simply isn't there. Frequency of me archiving messages: extremely high. Frequency of ch…

>> swipe-to-archive simply isn't there

>> Swiping the other direction exposes five options, two of which (I assume "archive" and "delete") have rather ambiguous icons

Hyperbole, much?

Re: One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

#45
I love the Gmail iPhone app.

In particular, I love that it lets me change the "from" address, similarly to how the gmail.com site lets me do that.

Neither Mail.app nor Sparrow made it easy to change the from.

I have a few different email addresses that all get forwarded to my gmail account. Finally my mobile mail problem -- being able to select my from -- is solved.

If anyone from Google is reading this, thank you!

Re: One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

#46
post #45

I love the Gmail iPhone app. In particular, I love that it lets me change the "from" address, similarly to how the gmail.com site lets me do that. Neither Mail.app nor Sparrow made it easy to change the from. I have a few different email addresses that all get forwarded to my gmail account. Finally my mobile mail problem -- being able to select my from -- is solved. If anyone from Google is reading this, thank you!

In Mail.app on iOS you just have to tap the 'From' address and choose a different one. What am I missing?

Re: One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

#48
post #45

I love the Gmail iPhone app. In particular, I love that it lets me change the "from" address, similarly to how the gmail.com site lets me do that. Neither Mail.app nor Sparrow made it easy to change the from. I have a few different email addresses that all get forwarded to my gmail account. Finally my mobile mail problem -- being able to select my from -- is solved. If anyone from Google is reading this, thank you!

In Mail.app on iOS you just have to tap the 'From' address and choose a different one. What am I missing?

There is no "from" address field.

Re: One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

#49
post #24

Google, I have the solution. Step 1: Checkout the Sparrow source code Step 2: Find and Replace All on the word "Sparrow" and change it to "Gmail" Step 3: Add push notifications. Compile and send to the app store.

I dunno about that - I really wanted to like Sparrow for iOS (aside from a couple bugs dealing with insane volumes of email, I love it on the desktop) but it never felt quite right to me. I've actually just now reinstalled it to check what bothered me so much, and it's the same issue I have with the new Gmail app: swipe-to-archive simply isn't there. Frequency of me archiving messages: extremely high. Frequency of ch…

Swiping is bullshit UI anyway. If there's no visual indication of what you can do, it's essentially nonexistent. This mania for turning every UI into a game of Myst is stupid.

Re: One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

#50
Point of note: the pinch-to-zoom failure to wrap text to the viewport is also a feature of some Apple apps -- notably Pages, which is very pretty on the iPhone but fundamentally Not Fit For Purpose as a word processor on those devices, unless you habitually write text in a column 5cm wide.

Pages is fine on the iPad's larger screen, which can scale to display a US letter or A4 page reasonably clearly.

I suspect the root of the problem is a misplaced prioritization of presentation over content. Probably the right thing to do with graphics, but a really bad idea when handling text-based documents.

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