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Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

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Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#61

Post by Avshalom »

dasil003 wrote: post #29

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…

Whoa whoa whoa. short by definition ? I use email to you know write to people if I want short I can text or chat or tweet or smoke signal. I rather assume email is long by definition.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#62

Post by randallu »

WayneDB wrote: post #52
notok22 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Aren't you more uniquely identifiable on a native app, though?

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#63

Post by dredmorbius »

ihnorton wrote: post #27

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…

I wrote a pair of shell scripts to deal with the URL encoding. I've also switched to DuckDuckGo for virtually all my search.

Apologies as HN's quoting is line-wrapping and I can't seem to fix it. I'll pastebin this.

http://pastebin.com/YvsAPm5u

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#64

Post by rsynnott »

derefr wrote: post #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+…

> is an effect of Windows and OSX, in their latest iterations, pushing apps to fullscreen virtual desktops.

Hrm, possibly Windows 8 does that; haven't used it. To do it on MacOS, you have to either click the strange icon in the top right, or hit the highly obvious key combination CMD-CTRL-F. Anecdotally, most people don't even seem to realise that the fullscreen thing exists, unless it's pointed out to them.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#65

Post by dasil003 »

Avshalom wrote: post #61
dasil003 wrote: post #29

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…

Whoa whoa whoa. short by definition ? I use email to you know write to people if I want short I can text or chat or tweet or smoke signal. I rather assume email is long by definition.

Okay I played fast and loose, but I meant this:

By definition of the length of a day, if you are sending any serious volume of emails then most of them are going to be short.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#66

Post by plorkyeran »

ihnorton wrote: post #27

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…

Everything about the new Google Maps besides the maps themselves is so mindbogglingly bad that I have no idea how they thought it was ready for public consumption. It seems to be missing most of the features of the classic Google Maps, and those that are present are far harder to use. The UI for the public transit schedules is pretty much the only thing that seems like it could be an improvement once I get used to it (but for now it's mostly just really awkward).

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#67

Post by dasil003 »

enochroot wrote: post #57
dasil003 wrote: post #29

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.

Nice pith, but how about adding some meat to that rebuttal.

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

The topic at hand is power emailing. Not people who write a message to their family once a week as the majority of their email.

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

I don't even know where you get this. Having a minimal interface with the most used features present and others grouped under menus of some sort is an age-old proven UI convention. This is the exact opposite of what I think of when I think of Microsoft software or other bloated programs with toolbars and ribbons bursting at the seams. Citing Microsoft is just a way for you to justify your emotional reaction to my comment without adding any substance.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#68

Post by dasil003 »

olog-hai wrote: post #46
dasil003 wrote: post #29

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…

> Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win It was possible to do this before the changes rolled out. Shift-compose opened it (still does) in a new window, and you could work with it and your mailbox side-by-side.

Not in reply it wasn't.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#70

Post by plorkyeran »

cheapsteak wrote: post #43
Sulfolobus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using shift-click to open in a new window is a fairly standard behaviour in most browsers these days isn't it? Then again I guess it wasn't intuitive in this case. Edit: I should note that the above is actually a genuine question.

Shift-click to open in a new window is a pattern for links. Gmail's 'Compose' doesn't look like a link, it looks like a button. Shift-clicking the 'search' button doesn't work on Google.com.

> Shift-clicking the 'search' button doesn't work on Google.com.

It does in pre-webkit Opera. One of the things I really miss in other browsers.

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