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Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

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Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#191

Post by dasil003 »

porker wrote: post #173
dasil003 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given the mess long email conversations become, if as CTO you're sending that many short emails I'd say you're using the wrong medium. A PM tool makes it much easier IME for the team to keep track of, and on top of, messages relevant to their projects, and reference them later.

You have so many assumptions in this response that I'm quite sure you don't know what you're saying. My organization is not a little tech startup with everyone sitting in a room. We have editors, translators, acquisitions, materials, marketing folks, etc. We have part time, full time, contractors, volunteers. We have people in over 20 countries, some working from home, some from offices, some from coffee shops. Most of them use Macs, some of them PCs, at least one person runs Linux.

Email is the universal medium. If I need to search for some history, I start with email since it is the most common. Skype we use for private and urgent chat. Campfire we use for general development chat. Basecamp we use for archivable product decision making. All of those have their uses.

I can't begin to think why you believe all my short emails are better suited for chat, but without context it's extremely, extremely ignorant and wrong.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#192

Post by dasil003 »

amirmc wrote: post #182
dasil003 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mini…

> "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." That use-case is completely valid. Unless you're going to argue that GMail is meant to be a'power emailing' tool, which I'd disagree with. Optimising for something that doesn't suit the majority of users is usually a mistake.

I'm sorry, your message makes no sense to me. There's nothing about Gmail that prevents that use case. I just responded because it's a stupid example.

> Unless you're going to argue that GMail is meant to be a'power emailing' tool, which I'd disagree with.

Okay, so first of all, yes Google was in fact invented to be a power email tool because it was built by engineers for engineers.

But that's neither here nor there because obviously they are trying to improve it for the most common case which is the source of the much-reviled changes.

It's not normal people that are complaining about these changes. It's entrenched power emailers who had their workflow thrown off by change and whose muscle memory is leading them to believe that this redesign is a disaster. New users won't have any worse experience than they did before, I guarantee you that.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#193

Post by dasil003 »

SilasX wrote: post #176
dasil003 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Still doesn't follow from the definition...

Why don't you go below and correct Avshalom's misuse of logical fallacies. I was trying to make a point you pedantic bore.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#195

Post by dasil003 »

ciniglio wrote: post #92
dasil003 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in reply it wasn't.

Shift+R could do it (Shift+a for reply all) https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en

I remember trying and being unable to do it. You may be right but current documentation doesn't really prove it.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#196

Post by ozh »

dcurtis wrote: post #75
rajivtiru wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the github library here: https://github.com/masukomi/kudos Also from the sourcecode on this blog: " rel="nofollow">https://github.com/masukomi/kudos-->

Interesting that someone took my code, nearly character-for-character, and "open sourced" it without permission.

Client side code is open source.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#197

Post by ChrisCinelli »

pg wrote: post #93
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…

There's a reason for this pattern. When I complained to a friend at Google about the new GMail compose, he said that what was driving it was that Larry wanted a beautiful, consistent look throughout all Google's products. That sort of motivation leads to design disasters. The various Google products may have been inconsistent, but each of their designs was the product of long evolution. Steve Jobs could probably have…

I am not sure how consistent they are... Beside the obvious learning curve to learn the new composer, I still find the old composer faster to use and more productive than the new one. Unless you know all the keyboard shortcut, now to use bullet points you need to click on the _A_, move the mouse on the bullet point icons and then clicking. Before one click was enough.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#199

Post by porker »

dasil003 wrote: post #191
porker wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the mess long email conversations become, if as CTO you're sending that many short emails I'd say you're using the wrong medium. A PM tool makes it much easier IME for the team to keep track of, and on top of, messages relevant to their projects, and reference them later.

You have so many assumptions in this response that I'm quite sure you don't know what you're saying. My organization is not a little tech startup with everyone sitting in a room. We have editors, translators, acquisitions, materials, marketing folks, etc. We have part time, full time, contractors, volunteers. We have people in over 20 countries, some working from home, some from offices, some from coffee shops. Most…

> I can't begin to think why you believe all my short emails are better suited for chat, but without context it's extremely, extremely ignorant and wrong.

I can't begin to think why you think I've even suggested chat, but hey, jump to your conclusions.

All that remains is for me to thank you for being a patronising bastard, and leave it there.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#200

Post by amirmc »

dasil003 wrote: post #192
amirmc wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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." That use-case is completely valid. Unless you're going to argue that GMail is meant to be a'power emailing' tool, which I'd disagree with. Optimising for something that doesn't suit the majority of users is usually a mistake.

I'm sorry, your message makes no sense to me. There's nothing about Gmail that prevents that use case. I just responded because it's a stupid example. > Unless you're going to argue that GMail is meant to be a'power emailing' tool, which I'd disagree with. Okay, so first of all, yes Google was in fact invented to be a power email tool because it was built by engineers for engineers. But that's neither here nor there…

> "I'm sorry, your message makes no sense to me..."

I'm trying to point out that the topic is wider than power emailing as these feature changes affect everyone. You don't get to choose which ones to adopt.

> "Okay, so first of all, yes Google was in fact invented to be a power email tool because it was built by engineers for engineers. ... obviously they are trying to improve it for the most common case"

It doesn't follow that Gmail was 'invented to be a power email tool'. Also, there's an assumption in there they're genuinely trying to improve for the common case. It could also be a range of internal pressures forcing changes that are actually detrimental for users. Companies fuck up like this all the time, so let's not pretend that Google is somehow exempt from that class of big-company-mistake.

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