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Comment by albertsun | Hacker News Reader

I really hope they preserve the Classic view. I can't stand how spaced out everything is. I went from being able to see 10 or so contacts in Gchat without scrolling down to just 4.

Edit: That's with the "Dense" view. Regular is even worse.

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Way too spaced out for my liking.

I go from seeing 34 messages per page to 24. And about 20 letters of the message summary are dropped.

Maybe they want you to search.

ironically, they need to improve the quality of the gmail search feature for that to be a viable direction in which to push users; the responsiveness and the lack of wildcards immediately comes to mind.

The lack of stemming is pretty bad, too. If I have a message with the word "dog" but I search for "dogs," I won't get any results. A search for "dog" will return the message, however.

In my case I just use the labels to filter, that way I never need to see long lists of emails to search for anything.

Agreed. Everything has too much whitespace. Also there needs to be more borders and accents within reason. Everything kind of just blends together as white to my eyes right now. This goes for gcal too. Glad this is an optional theme for now though.

For me, great design really translates into "ADD friendly." Visual clutter is a nightmare for me in terms of immediate focus. This simple spacing does WONDERS for visual organization in my brain. It really is amazing. I've actually written scripts before to add some padding (CSS padding that is) to reddit to make things easier.

The month view in the new Calendar is even worse. You could see 5 appointments per day (4 if you had more than 5, since it showed '+x more'). Now you can see only one. It has gone for good to useless.

I can see four appointments, or 3 with a '+x more', in month view with the new theme.

Yes, it turns out it grows based on the screen size. Still, with the browser maximized on my laptop, I see only one where it used to be 5 (or 4 + more).

> I went from being able to see 10 or so contacts in Gchat without scrolling down to just 4.

I have found that the right-side chat Gmail labs feature is useful as a way to display additional contacts without scrolling in Gchat. It may be even more useful with the increased spacing.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/new-in-labs-right-side...

I'm thinking it might work well for me on a higher res screen. On the 1280x800 MBP screen I'm on now it's not very usable. I switched back to "Basic White" theme. I like that one a lot.

I hated it too, and then tried shift-refresh. To my surprise it actually worked, and now "Dense" is fairly good.

Be sure to leave feedback. I asked for denser "dense" view.

the ui looks weird with multiple-inboxes placed side by side.

I find that using the Dense view, then zooming out one tick in your web browser produces a very nice look. Although that's more of a workaround than a fix to a potential problem.

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