Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

googledrive.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 230 posts

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#181

Post by millstone »

bhouston wrote: post #95
gdulli wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many powerful, competent, and well-funded entities with a vested interest in improving the web app experience (including Google). I wouldn't claim they're doomed from the start. I've been using gmail for almost 10 years. I liked it from the start. But it's getting worse, not better. It's extremely slow compared to what I'm used to with Exchange and Outlook, and navigating around is more of a chore. How do…

Gmail UI sucks in part because they are going for the masses, not the power user. It isn't HTML5's fault.

A lot of it is due to the limitations of HTML. For example, HTML is why Gmail paginates about as well as PHP app from 1998, instead of allowing you to just scroll through all of them like a native client.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#182

Post by aragot »

bhouston wrote: post #95
gdulli wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many powerful, competent, and well-funded entities with a vested interest in improving the web app experience (including Google). I wouldn't claim they're doomed from the start. I've been using gmail for almost 10 years. I liked it from the start. But it's getting worse, not better. It's extremely slow compared to what I'm used to with Exchange and Outlook, and navigating around is more of a chore. How do…

Gmail UI sucks in part because they are going for the masses, not the power user. It isn't HTML5's fault.

They are going for the masses, but my mother complains to me about it (the compose experience). She's 60.

Don't get me started on the emails she loses in the Promotions tab.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#183

Post by skeletonjelly »

yan wrote: post #37

Am I the only one that is distracted by the name "Google Sheets?" It doesn't exactly roll of the tongue, awkward to say and doesn't exactly scream "spreadsheets" when placed next to other Google Docs (Drive?) products. It can just as easily have been a presentation tool, or something else entirely. Although, it's probably ambiguous only to me and for most other people, sheets == spreadsheets.

The name will make business conversations awkward to Kiwis. Maybe.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#184

Post by VikingCoder »

nightski wrote: post #74
VikingCoder wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget that you used to boot your PC into a game disk to play a game. When people started playing games in Windows (full-screen), people like the grandparent poster would RAIL that booting to a game disk would always be superior to building a game on top of Windows.

We still have consoles, which get much better performance for the given hardware. True they can't compete with desktops even with the inefficiencies built in, but that is not relevant. The web faces fundamental limitations as long as it is built on the current architecture of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Windows, being a general purpose OS like Linux, has far less restrictions.

John Carmack famously reported that you can double the performance of a game engine, if you know exactly what the hardware configuration is.

I think that ENTIRELY explains the performance gain you see in consoles.

And for most apps, no, there is no major difference in the user interface capabilities of a browser, and a Win32 GUI.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#185

Post by jebblue »

gdulli wrote: post #93
freyr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, we all like what we're used to. To the OP, insisting that apps running in browsers will never match native apps in terms of UX, that's a very audacious claim. There are many powerful, competent, and well-funded entities with a vested interest in improving the web app experience (including Google). I wouldn't claim they're doomed from the start. This could be just another example of a disruptive technology, that's…

> There are many powerful, competent, and well-funded entities with a vested interest in improving the web app experience (including Google). I wouldn't claim they're doomed from the start. I've been using gmail for almost 10 years. I liked it from the start. But it's getting worse, not better. It's extremely slow compared to what I'm used to with Exchange and Outlook, and navigating around is more of a chore. How do…

>> It's extremely slow compared to what I'm used to with Exchange and Outlook, and navigating around is more of a chore.

Its performance is fine from what I see every day. Plus it integrates with my phone and my home Linux desktop via the browser very nicely. Navigating is different but not worse than Office by any stretch, just my opinion.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#186

Post by jebblue »

wodenokoto wrote: post #56
azakai wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been years and still Google only implements offline mode in docs for Chrome? This looks shameful, but perhaps there is some reason that Google people reading HN can explain? From what I can tell this requires a Chrome app from the Chrome Web Store. So it is not standard HTML5 stuff. Does Google intend to fully support non-Chrome browsers? This behavior seems to show otherwise.

While it is hard to say what Google expects to do or not to do, it does seem like Google are building an app platform on Chrome in parallel to the so called web app platform (HTML5 + Javascript).

With DART and Go and Google Fiber, all one company. It kind of worries me to be honest. Overall though as long as Larry and Sergei are there it should be OK I think.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#187

Post by nmjenkins »

millstone wrote: post #181
bhouston wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail UI sucks in part because they are going for the masses, not the power user. It isn't HTML5's fault.

A lot of it is due to the limitations of HTML. For example, HTML is why Gmail paginates about as well as PHP app from 1998, instead of allowing you to just scroll through all of them like a native client.

Nonsense. FastMail's webmail allows you to scroll continuously through (or jump to any section of) your mailbox, even when they have 100,000+ messages in them. (Disclaimer: I work for FastMail). This is not an inherent limitation of the underlying technology, just one of implementation.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#188

Post by dragonwriter »

millstone wrote: post #181
bhouston wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail UI sucks in part because they are going for the masses, not the power user. It isn't HTML5's fault.

A lot of it is due to the limitations of HTML. For example, HTML is why Gmail paginates about as well as PHP app from 1998, instead of allowing you to just scroll through all of them like a native client.

> For example, HTML is why Gmail paginates about as well as PHP app from 1998, instead of allowing you to just scroll through all of them like a native client.

No, its not. HTML + JS, via AJAX, supports infinite scroll with a finite amount loaded at any given time. IIRC, Google has used that on Google Image Search and some other properties.

There may be web platform associated performance or other considerations behind pagination, but its not a fundamental can't-do limit of the technology.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#189

Post by andrewflnr »

Double_Cast wrote: post #114
yan wrote: post #37

Am I the only one that is distracted by the name "Google Sheets?" It doesn't exactly roll of the tongue, awkward to say and doesn't exactly scream "spreadsheets" when placed next to other Google Docs (Drive?) products. It can just as easily have been a presentation tool, or something else entirely. Although, it's probably ambiguous only to me and for most other people, sheets == spreadsheets.

I propose Gcell for slang. It's quicker, analogous to Gmail , and vaguely reminiscent of Excel .

IIRC they're trying to avoid GStuff-type names.

Re: New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

#190

Post by e12e »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #155
toomuchtodo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps than they should give the masses their interface and give us a standards-based/compliant JSON interface. We're headed that way already.

Which JSON-based email standard would that be, exactly?

I believe ops point was that any stable api would be preferable to: "Yeah, there's an api, but we refuse to document it, and we'll randomly depricate stuff if you try to use it to build something that isn't gmail". The team behind gmail is probably one of the best qualified to hammer out a working api for email of json (what we have + a bit of what we want + stability and versioning). No reason why they couldn't publish that as an RFC and let people implement a front end for dbmail or whatnot that spoke the same api.
Post reply on HN