A former lead designer of Gmail fixes Gmail with a Chrome extension
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Sure, not many desktop apps have a huge top left logo, but almost all websites do. Acting like this is a unique failing of Gmail is strange to me.
Note also that, in GMail, the logo isn't a menu. It is just a link to the page you are already on. There's a hamburger menu next to it, but that just opens the sidebar.
Neither of those examples actually look useful, the fix is definitely more easy on the eyes though. The empty space between the rows of email messages seems unnecessarily big. I get this was done for design's sake, and yes it looks 'pretty' and 'light' in the flat minimalistic way, and otherwise you'd have this dense chunk of the screen. I still think having twice (or comparing to mine, even three times more) the emails displayed on a per row basis makes scanning for things easier at a glance.
That fix actually resembles something I do to websites, ad-blocking away all the unnecessary elements, siderails, wrappers, navbars, footers, etc. It's very cathartic spending a few seconds resculpting a website to reveal only the relevant content. And the end result always convinces me that less is more when it comes to web design, that regular text and simple formatting should be prioritized higher.
I remember getting access to gmail when it was in the invite-only phase and thinking that it was absolute magic, that this was the future, and that I'd never use anything else. It only took a huge pile of JS to undo that. I use basic HTML now for gmail and I've switched a lot of what I do to fastmail.
Standard Gmail does allow for a dark background, would like that in Basic HTML.
It’s able to make pretty much any website dark themed.
https://userstyles.org/styles/browse?search_terms=dark+gmail
Addons for Firefox include Aardvark, (generic) Element Hiding Helpers, Lizard, Nuke Anything. You press whatever shortcut is assigned and highlight the element your cursor is over (or highlighted text/section), an interface pops up, you specify the domain filter (twitter.com), and filter by attribute (import-prompt), OK, and the rule "twitter.com##.import-prompt" now forever hides twitter's annoying import flex module.
The addons for Firefox I've seen are mostly GUI-based. An exception is Nuke Anything, which I believe can be done through keyboard and context menu options.
Careful when complaining about spacing - when it comes to text, spacing is a functional decision, yes it will make it look pretty when done "right" but this is often also because it is more legible - function and aesthetic are the same when it comes to typography.
Similarly others have complained about the spacing left and right (i.e it being excessively padded to be centered), but this is also for legibility - the very same reason newspapers have columns and not full width text.
Newspapers also do not have 6-inch margins on either side.
Another irritation of mine is fixed-width sites. If I'm making my browser window wider, chances are I'm trying to widen the text, not expect it to stay in a narrow column in the middle with useless space on either side. If I wanted it narrow, I would've narrowed the window.
Careful with that phrase, as apparently a large number of designers think it means less content too!
Extrapolating from that screenshot, it looks like that window could hold about a dozen emails. I use the no-frills Mail.app on macOS and a window that's takes about half or two thirds of my screen, and fits 40 emails. In my case I also get to see the "To" address in the list, helping me quickly triage the emails that are not sent to me alone.
Do people really prefer low density interfaces these days?
Removing the visual clutter is certainly an improvement but desktop apps have the menu bar where they can put all the actions, whereas a web app is more limited: it's either a mess of buttons or hamburger buttons which often end up a bit clumsy.
New version of gmail is so much worse for me on PC - lower density, much slower to work with on Firefox (I ain't switching to Chrome due to this, no thank you).
Something akin to Microsoft putting that idiotic (sorry but I can't be polite with this specific topic) mobile-like interface into Windows 10 for desktops. Unifying what shouldn't be unified.
That appears to be the default ("comfortable") but you can change it to "compact".
Just by glancing at it, I'd imagine that it's tightly coupled with the markup and styling of Gmail. If Gmail changes anything about its layout, the extension has to change, too. Does this mean that your extension is periodically broken (and you have to be available to fix it after every layout change/tweak) or is there a better way (e.g. some Gmail-specific APIs or some such)?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simplify-gmail/pbm...
Electricity can also be generated in large quantities without changing the climate.
That electricity could have been used to replace polluting power-sources.
Yes, this company could have bought the solar panels and then sold their electricity on the market, perhaps displacing some conventional energy source, but that isn't their business.
Their business is this crypto market for carbon credits; they have a need for power, they fill that need with a renewable source.
I think that was even more telling, my experience with it was awfully reminiscent of how some social media are ordering their news feed by some biased weight instead of the default chronological order.
I honestly can't tell you whether the decluttering here is better or worse for the average user. It's the kind of thing that's hard to measure, and the aesthetic judgment is subjective. I can say that desaturating some of the widgets looks nice: I myself have to constantly fight with my team who wants to draw attention to their new feature by giving it a color pop.
But I myself don't feel that GMail's UX is so radically broken that it's worth the effort of installing a browser-specific extension, thus binding me to that browser and requiring me to re-install on every device.
The design was welcome, to be sure. But there were far more important features to getting email out of the way. Automatic, inline message grouping by travel, priority, sender, etc; Advanced snooze that included "snooze until delivery date" for packages; Infinite Snooze, which was great for bookmarks with notes; Big, clear done / delete buttons; No ads - not that I expected that to last.
It's been long enough that I've begun to forget the other features since I switched back soon after the announcement, but moving back to gmail has been jarring. The old design is confusing, yes, but I can manage as I'd used it for a decade prior. The design was essential, but mostly icing.
Some things are fixed in the last releases of FF, but according of what I read recently, Google is doing this on purpose.
Any addon or userscript recommended?
By the way, here are the tricks I do to do inbox zero on gmail: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/290175
You're being downvoted for being off topic perhaps, but in years of looking at threads like this I'd never seen that tip. And not using the UI at all is a viable approach.
Incidentally I must be on an old UI, my gmail looks nothing like that. Either version looks harder to navigate than the classic one.
Bonus points if the gmail webmail would re-flow quotations correctly and not break the lines inappropriately.
Hiding some icons fixes nothing. It's just a style chnage.
I just seemed like an odd thing to keep emphasising “a free chrome extension”
I thought they were all free
Also it's interesting to see this guy's history. Many of his ideas were great but failed to sustain themselves as-is. But he keeps coming back with other great ideas.. I hope he gets something out that gets a nice and long spot.
Then why he doesn't give Google the boot?
I hated the design of the new gmail when it came out, and now I tolerate it, but that toolbar is handy nonetheless.
Blockchain. Interesting.
Carbon Removal Certificate (CRC): a digital asset, or electronic certificate, that is stored on the Ethereum blockchain in the Nori application. One CRC represents one tonne of CO2-equivalent heat trapping gas that has been removed from the atmosphere and stored in an industrial, terrestrial, subsurface, and/or aquatic reservoir.
Oh come on...
Can it be employed to mean the opposite? As in, “addressing” things for the worse?
For example I could address climate change with blockchain by suggesting that people don't use bitcoin. Even if I continue to use bitcoin this could be considered addressing the problem.
Result is incredibly fuzzy https://lol768.com/i/AmpAbuseDormMendez
But in this specific instance, it is even more ridiculous as one of the biggest concerns surrounding blockchain technology is that it is insanely inefficient in terms of energy usage, and concerns have been raised about how widespread usage of blockchain technology could exacerbate climate change.
There have been so many proposed algorithms on this idea over the past years, yet here we are, still waiting. For now, it's either vaporware or it has a security flaw.
Or, like traditional proof-of-work mining has become, it will coalesce into the very thing it was meant to remove: control by a few powerful and centralized authorities.
Regardless, blockchain is not going to help solve climate change. A distributed carbon credit market is not going to solve climate change.
I want proof-of-stake to work. I really do. But I just don't believe it can anymore...
There are several proof of stake networks running right now. Care to elaborate on the security flaws?
I can make my website here:
Now, what am I missing?
Farmers can sell their carbon credits to fund things that need to happen on their farm, to businesses that need to purchase carbon offsets because they're producing more than they should be.
Could it be done without crypto? Almost certainly. But I think the article's flyby description gives the thing room to sound much sillier than it really is.
The particular irony here is that blockchains are a giant waste of energy compared to non-blockchain approaches, so of all the things to say “Do X with blockchain” about, “Reduce carbon emissions” is an odd choice.
If it were me I’d think you’d want to put I extra effort to not have a blockchain based solution, but I have a feeling the idea cane about from “what can we do with a blockchain” rather than “what is the best solution to this problem?”
Blockchain multi-party verification can be fairly fast when you take out the grift. Well, that grift. The buzzword-solution-searching-for-a-problem grift, as you note, is still very much in play.
Not all blockchains are proof-of-work. Almost all modern implementations (particularly for federated blockchains like OPs) use more power-efficient consensus algorithms.
(I don't have an opinion on whether blockchains are the best solution to their problem, but a decentralized marketplace for carbon offsets does sound compelling.)
i think having it be decentralized is a good way to build trust and transparency. It also protects one against the marketplace-operator acting against the interests of or favoring any one party.
Consider how Amazon now exploits its marketplace for its own benefit by analyzing which products are doing well and making their own versions of these products. So, there is potential for the marketplace-operator to become non-neutral.
I'm not sure how the NYSE started, but i suspect there are financial regulations governing its operations. These regulations take time to get established, and so in new fields having a decentralized marketplace that can guarantee neutrality (collectively) of the operators feels worthwhile.
Does that make sense? i'm kinda on the fence myself, and trying to present the argument in-favor.
1: https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answerstradinghalthtm.html
1. a meta-level: all designs of systems have tradeoffs. There is no perfect system. So, by decentralizing we may have to tradeoff the ability to halt trading, in exchange for getting more openness, transparency and neutrality of the marketplace or its operators.
2. specific design: i think there may be ways of achieving this even in a decentralized fashion.
Many use-cases of smart-contracts (i.e. a program run in a blockchain transaction) have envisioned the need for having an "oracle" or external data source. For example, flight-delay insurance contracts (e.g. on etherisc.com) that payout in case of a flight delay would need to get information from some flight-info APIs. To serve this need, there are projects for building decentralized-oracles (e.g. https://chain.link).
Similarly, one can imagine the SEC creates an oracle through a system like ChainLink. This oracle has an api that indicates whether some asset's trading status is ON or OFF. Smart-contracts running the marketplace/exchange on the blockchain have code that reaches out to the SEC oracle before proceeding with a transaction to exchange or sell some asset (i'm describing this synchronously, but it could be done asynchronously).
There's no cryptocurrency angle, which I believe means that there's no gross energy expenditure, although I'm not an expert and never asked.
Highly doubtful that they're "doing extremely well" when there's no functioning business.
> Could it be done without crypto? Almost certainly.
It is being done without crypto!
The only value crypto brings is a way to advertise 'proof' of purchase of offsets to the public, IOW for marketing purposes.