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Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

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Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#52
post #45
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: maps, you can revert to "classic" by clicking on the gear.

I tried this, but it keeps forgeting the choice to use the classic maps and I always have to go to the options and pick it again. It's not such a big deal, but yeah, it's annoying.

Web apps and me are constantly at odds because I run all sorts of privacy extensions, I disabled Local Storage (via folder permissions) and I don't let cookies persist. So, I just stopped using web apps wherever possible in favor of native ones. It pisses me off too because the web (and the Internet) could be so much better than this.

Anyway, for the longest time - even with a bare browser (no extensions) - YouTube wouldn't save certain settings (annotations disabled, video quality), even while I was logged in.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#53
I have a feeling that this new design ("docked floating div" instead of "new regular window"; "modal floating div" instead of "new fullscreen window") is an effect of Windows and OSX, in their latest iterations, pushing apps to fullscreen virtual desktops.

If Gmail is the whole screen, you can't actually open a "new window"; it would open back on the primary desktop, instead of within the app's screen. Maybe Windows+OSX need to refine their "app-desktop" solutions with some limited form of window management, so that every app isn't having to reinvent its own window management just to keep its windows visible...

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#54

I still use the basic HTML client in many circumstances, esp. when tethering off my phone with limited reception: https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ It approximates the first Ajax/DHTML interface that Gmail introduced when it launched in 2004.

The basic HTML view of gmail has no latency hiding abilities of any kind. It is much slower for every action, and it gets worse the slower your connection is. If you have a high bandwidth, high latency link like "4G" mobile service, ordinary Gmail is almost certainly better.

If course if you have something like GPRS then basic HTML is just the thing.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm kinda OCD about my email. Thanks, just found the HN thread about email clients. Checking out Airmail now.

Link to the HN thread with email clients?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6286127

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#57

The self-righteous anger about the irredeemable horror of the new Gmail compose is starting to get a bit old. First of all, it's not as one-sided as people are making it out. I was also annoyed when it first came out, but there are some clear benefits. Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload (CTO for a 30-person company). There are some important philosop…

I chuckled when I read:

> First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always good.

"Sorry mom, I intended to write you a longer message but gmail encourages me to keep it short."

> Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability nightmare people make out.

Folks at Microsoft are nodding their heads and furiously tweeting this sentence.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#59
post #37

Lately I've had a persistent feeling of annoyance with several Google products. Each annoyance is small enough to tolerate individually, but in aggregate it seems to me that Google has really lost something in the attention-to-detail department; this kind of persistent annoyance was the same thing that led me to Google from other services years ago. Two examples: - maps: new interface is so terrible that I am activel…

Re: maps, you can revert to "classic" by clicking on the gear.

For now.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#60
post #18
post #14

My problem with that is people who write emails in full screen windows end up writing poorly formatted emails (very long paragraphs) because they are now composing their emails with 300 columns. Besides, a CEO that can't focus on writing a message unless they don't have any other distraction on their screen should probably work on their focus skills.

"should probably work on their focus skills" Terrible argument. "Let's add more distractions to the screen, because the user should be able to focus anyway". Also, Google broke the "Best Secret Gmail Feature" [1]. In the last few months, you can't select text and hit reply to quote it anymore. Grrr [1] http://gizmodo.com/5963768/the-best-secret-gmail-feature-is-...

Really? This still works for me, I use it a lot...
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