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

I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

taigeair.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 344 posts

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#161

Post by skriticos2 »

DanBC wrote: post #87
cmircea wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ctrl + Shift + 8? You gotta be shitting me! Ctrl + ] & [ to indent? What's wrong with Tab & Shift-Tab, like in every other app?

Uh, [tab] usually switches focus to next control, and shift-tab switches focus to previous control. Thus, when I hit [tab] now focus is taken out of this text box and to the reply button.

That's actually not an easy problem to solve. When I'm creating some (desktop) UI that has multiple controls one being a text box, it always destroys the workflow (tab - next, tab - next, tab - indent.. crap..). I did not find a good solution for this so far.

Edit: Thinking about it.. maybe I'll try big G's version.

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#162

Post by benaiah »

To all the people complaining about text formatting in Gmail, I strongly recommend Markdown Here: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here. It lets you write emails as markdown and compile them to HTML in the email composition form. (I have mine bound to CTRL-ALT-Q). It works extremely well, I can easily store my emails in plain-text if I need to, I write emails in my text editor, and the Markdown utilities there make formatting much faster. It's great.

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-here/elif... FF/Thunderbird extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-here...

As for the UI complaints, I haven't hit too many of them, but those that I have have been very irritating. I don't use an email signature ATM, but I have run into the hard-to-change-sending-address quite a bit (I use +@gmail.com quite a bit), and didn't even know you could do it until just now. I only started using Gmail recently, so I can't say if it's worse, though it seems to be from what I've heard.

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#164

Post by visarga »

Blinkky wrote: post #2

I wouldn't consider myself a gmail power user, but I do use it as my every day email. I love the new updates. Most of the things that gmail makes hard (and when the author says hard he means an extra click) are things that are rarely, if ever, done by me. This is exactly how I think email should function, make the stuff you use most easy. The author mentions things like "It's hard to delete my signature." I've never…

> Most of the things that gmail makes hard (and when the author says hard he means an extra click)

You have to memorize where to do the extra click.

For example I tried to unsubscribe from a G+ community today and didn't find the unsubscribe button without a google search. I had to appeal to other websites to learn where the unsubscribe was buried. Same thing happened when I tried to cancel an automated monthly payment in PayPal - they fucking buried the page. Sometimes I have this problem when I try to help someone change a setting on his feature phone. Some essential items are under 5 levels of selection deep.

The main problem is that people don't know which one of the button hides what they seek. I liked the old interface much more. I'd like to have the option to remain with the old one.

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#165

Post by oinksoft »

Tomis02 wrote: post #21

I'm planing to move to fastmail.fm in the near future. I find the Gmail UI very sluggish and quite the opposite of being user friendly, and I also don't have any guarantee I won't become a horror story about how Google automatically shut down my account without me doing anything wrong.

The FastMail UI is the best webmail interface I have used. It has keybindings for just about everything, and the UI is snappy and intuitive. Did I mention it doesn't hit me up to join Google+ or give it my mobile?

Moving to FastMail from GMail for personal emails, and self-hosted (via Thunderbird) for business emails, has been nothing but a pleasure.

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#166

Post by twistedpair »

mixmax wrote: post #74

Here's another total usability fail: Tab sends the e-mail you're currently writing instead of indenting text. Everywhere else tab indents text, and when you write an e-mail in gmail you'd expect it to act consistently with how it's used everywhere else. Start writing in gmail, hit tab to indent some text. Congratulations you've now sent half an e-mail to you boss.... I can't fathom who thought this was a good idea.

At least they added Alt+Enter to send the email now. That's been the Outlook default since the start of time.

Now I can use the same commands at work and at home. Perfect.

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#167

Post by mongol »

pbreit wrote: post #143
richardjs wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's nitpicking. It's the difference between the standard way web forms work and Gmail overriding a known behavior to do something else. That said, after you hit tab, you'll probably type a word and hit space, which will then click the button and send off the message.

The standard way that web forms have worked forever is that tab moves focus to the next element.

Yes that is true. But what is the standard way to insert a tab?

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#168

Post by oinksoft »

missing_cipher wrote: post #127
mixmax wrote: post #74

Here's another total usability fail: Tab sends the e-mail you're currently writing instead of indenting text. Everywhere else tab indents text, and when you write an e-mail in gmail you'd expect it to act consistently with how it's used everywhere else. Start writing in gmail, hit tab to indent some text. Congratulations you've now sent half an e-mail to you boss.... I can't fathom who thought this was a good idea.

The default behavior for "Tab" on the web is to move to the next element on the Tab order.

The default behavior for Tab in rich text editors has been to insert a tabstop for quite some time. I think this is just a casualty of goog.editor.Editor's unconventional default behavior, which is to tab out of the field. If that is truly an oversight (not overriding this behavior), it says a lot about how the Gmail project is being run these days, because previously they did override this.

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#169

Post by twistedpair »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #15

I'm torn between strongly agreeing with these points and wanting to comment pointing out that none of them matter..... I hate change for change's sake, but the new gmail compose window has made me more efficient. It took some getting used to however. Responses to the points made in the article: 1) I can’t easily delete my signatures. Forget about deleting your sig and generally cleaning up email threads. Decent email…

Don't forget they're going after the Outlook crowd here. Did anyone else notice the new use of Outlook send key bindings?

In the past you had to open lots of pop outs to write multiple mails. Now I can be composing 3 messages and reading another in the background. That's the point. Do more with your screen real estate.

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#170

Post by iamshs »

joering2 wrote: post #150

The biggest disappointment was to kill drag and drop attachments. Now you have to click the paper clip and pick the picture (one by one!) form your PC. In my opinion that's an indication that Google wants to discourage you from adding a lot of attachments to your mail because they don't make money off the bandwidth you are using. To me its another indication that Gmail at some point in near future may be doomed to su…

Bang On. I encountered this a week before too. I had to pick the pictures, drag and drop just in-lined them. On attaching the pictures, there was hardly any space in the window left to write any words. I am in transition to another email provider, but I am being forced to do so, and at a critical juncture for me personally.
Post reply on HN