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| How to cope with the Gmail redesign |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-04-22 17:48:21 |
| "Reports are coming in from around the Internet that the Gmail redesign, which we were previously able to stave off with 'revert to the old look temporarily', is now forcing itself upon us. I too have succumbed to the new design, and have been forced to find ways to cope. Here's what I did to make it semi-bearable." The Gmail redesign has been the biggest whine-a-thon in the history of the web ('cope'? Bearable'?). For what it's worth, the Gmail redesign has been a godsend for me - the new Gmail is beautiful, understated, and elegant. I love it. I guess the old adage still goes: the satisfied people don't take to the web. |
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| Well, it's still usable |
| By dorin.lazar on 2012-04-22 18:49:54 |
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I cried a lot about the new design of GMail - and indeed, I used pretty much the same solution to make the gmail bearable. And now I got used to it, and it works again, I don't mind it anymore. The new design feels ugly as it comes out of the box. I like my mail in a certain way, the old gmail didn't satisfy it but it was close enough, and I think I'm equally dissatisfied right now with the new one as with the old one. So yes, no more crying over spoiled milk - I just roll with it. Heck, it's free, and it's usable. I have nothing to complain about, or have I? |
 - Score: 3 |
| Little dogs might bark the loudest |
| By judgen on 2012-04-22 19:04:18 |
| As long as gmail is accessible with "mutt" i do not mind any redesign, as i simply prefer my lovely half breed doggy. |
| - Score: 5 |
| Any redesign is like that. |
| By leos on 2012-04-22 19:08:20 |
| Anytime Facebook changes anything the whiners come out of the woodwork. "Waaah. How dare Facebook keep evolving! I'm 90 years old and can't handle change! This is the end times!" |
| - Score: 3 |
| Usability problem |
| By Dekonega on 2012-04-22 19:21:17 |
| The New Gmail has usability problem. How can they change colours so that you now have tons of ugly transparent sections and black and grey text on a dark grey backgrounds? It's unreadable in my opinion. And what's the worst is that the high contrast theme of Gmail isn't black and white but also features tons of some more grey which practically ruins the whole purpose of that theme. |
| - Score: 2 |
| The new design looks good but it's annoying |
| By nej_simon on 2012-04-22 19:28:56 |
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The list of gtalk contact now overlaps the list of labels, and it moves up and down depending on where you have the pointer. This annoys me a lot. The old design where the gtalk contact where put firmly under the list of labels was a lot better. Otherwise I think the new design is ok. After you tweak it a little, that is. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: The new design looks good but it's annoying |
| By dorin.lazar on 2012-04-22 19:41:41 |
|
Just press on 'Less' - and keep it 'compacted' It won't jump like crazy over your contacts. I like to have the labels hidden unless they contain some items unread - and I selected for all the labels 'show if unread'. It works quite fine for me like that. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Comment by ssokolow |
| By ssokolow on 2012-04-22 19:51:00 |
|
My big problem with GMail is that they do redesign so much and they never fix the rough edges that actually matter to me. Hence why I've always used it via IMAP and, now that I've got a VPS handy, I'll probably switch to doing my own e-mail handling. (My GMail account has always sat behind a swarm of forwarders on my own domain, so switching is easy.) |
| - Score: 2 |
| OSNews redesign |
| By Moredhas on 2012-04-22 20:18:53 |
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(Engage Facebook mode) THEY CHANGED IT NOW IT SUCKS! Ever since OS News moved away from that single page layout with the grey background, it's been totally unusable! I swear never to use OS News again! </sarcasm> I deal with "they changed it now it sucks" in every part of my life. At work, I have customers who occasionally update their software (imagine that), and the slightest of changes seem to inspire uncontrollable rage and despair in them. When I used to play Magic, I heard waves of "they changed it now it sucks" with the M2010 rules revision. Guess what, I heard the same thing with the Sixth edition rules revision, back in the 90s. Speaking of gaming, D&D editions. It seems every new edition ruins the game forever. Warhammer, every time a new codex comes out, the players of that army are pissed because they have to change their army list and buy new models (wow, Games Workshop wants your money? Who'd have thought?), while those who don't get pissed and use phrases "that's OP" and "fucking hax". |
| - Score: 2 |
| A question (slightly OT) |
| By boblowski on 2012-04-22 20:27:20 |
|
Ok, this is something that really starts to make me wonder. Every time when I see screen pictures of an email program, file manager, some web application, or whatever, I notice there are just a very limited number of items in the lists. Like in this example just 7 messages. And even if there would have been more messages, in the default layout perhaps just 15 to 20 messages can be shown. It's the same when you see pictures of some file manager, they never seem have more then perhaps 20 files and 4 folders to manage. Even on my private notebook there are at least several hundreds of mail messages that I still need and a few thousand work files and documents I want to handle. I'd guess professionally I have something like 50-100 messages a day to manage. I can give countless other examples. CRM systems that just show 10 contacts on a page, file managers that just show 40 rows of files, Skype that just shows like 30 lines of chat messages, FaceBook's scrolling to see what you need, etc. Really just wondering, but I read all the time about people drowning in an overload of information, but at the same time it seems to me like all the tools and applications show less and less information. I really can see how showing less information can be a good thing, but surely I can't be the only one with more than a single page of emails, files, or messages to manage? |
| - Score: 7 |
| RE: Well, it's still usable |
| By mkools on 2012-04-22 21:33:36 |
| Same here. I got used to the new look. They should make compact mode the default though which is much better. I temporary reverted to the old look some time ago and I didn't like it anymore. It sucks though that they force people to use the new look. It should be optional. |
| - Score: 2 |
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