Hacker News Reader

Comment by losingom | Hacker News Reader

If nothing else, it's impressive that they've actually managed to migrate those Google Talk users over the years (myself included in that, albeit less than I used to). They probably did so extremely begrudgingly, but the path went something like:

Google Talk -> Hangouts -> Google Chat

People I added years ago are still reachable in Chat, which I guess is nice (in spite of everything else).

View on HN

And Google Chat is pretty decent IMO if you're committed to Google Workspace. How you use it is probably a bit cultural. Where I work--or at least the teams I interact with--it seems to have developed into use Chat if you want a somewhat near-time response rather than email. At least the people I know rarely text these days and essentially never call on voice. Group chats vary by context.

The UX is absolutely horrendous. Don’t even get me started about the 4096 character limit or the fact that URLs in code blocks breaks the code block.

How about not being able to sort the user list by whatever order you want or folding groups? What about it creating “Spaces” for chats with more than one contact and forcing you to “leave” if you want to hide it to keep your list clean?

Maybe we should talk about how they recently started capturing, poorly, formatted text when you paste, forcing a paste with match style to strip it and no way to remove that default.

Maybe we should talk about the horrendous fact that it’s a web app.

Maybe we could add in there’s no user configuration ability at all.

Fuck Google Chat. It’s a horrendous piece of shit and it needs to die, not third party support.

>Maybe we should talk about the horrendous fact that it’s a web app.

I don't need more apps. Unless there's a compelling reason to have one, I'd much rather be able to sit down at any PC and have the same experience. (I do have the app installed on my phone for notifications but I have those turned off on my PCs anyway.)

I don't really need chat apps in general. You can send me an email but Gchat is fine because it's integrated with Gmail.

No one’s against the existence of a web app.

But most people seem to prefer the desktop versions of chat apps.

They really should have both.

I'm still annoyed at how the "Markdown" syntax in Google Chat is not following the CommonMark specifications.

Indeed, while not ideal, generally they've had a decent migration path. At least for the "message someone inside Gmail" usecase, as far as people are concern, for most people nothing has changed other than some slight UI. Outside of Gmail (especially on android) it is not as clean though.

Hangouts worked excellently for so many years, even after most transitioned out of Talk (aka 3rd party clients) -- available in gmail, available on web, working app etc. Actually with Chat appearing on the scene the transition has been pretty seemless also, with Hangouts still working on web if you wanted it to, and interchangable with Chat versions.

Who says that they managed it? I went from Google Talk to Hangouts to no Google Services aside from Play store, kept only because of Android devices... Ideally I would not rely on any Google services, but it is not feasible for me...

I love Google but at this point I always expect them to drop support for anything.

What would it take for you to not love them anymore? They're like a friend who is always making plans, then bailing at the last minute.

A cohesive suite of products mimicking microsoft connected to my inbox and a text feature :D preferbly with around 10+ years of my data.

I can't lie, its a heavy moat.

If maps started sucking I'd leave. We'll see how bad the new advertising features get. But right now it's just head and shoulders above anything else.

Yes, Maps is the best I've used. I had Apple maps on the other day. I knew the area and knew I was close to the destination. A left turn and about 100 yards down the road. Apple wanted to take me nearly a mile north and then loop back. It does that kind of stuff all the time.

I haven't compared Google Maps to a dedicated device like a Garmin. I wonder how that would do.

It depends on what you're using it for. Maybe it's the best for finding things like restaurants, looking up business hours, reviews, things like that. Basically a spatial view of points of interests. But as a map I find it very lacking, mainly because of their color scheme, but they're also missing data lite small roads, paths, small lakes. White roads on light gray is difficult to see, and overall it's very low contrast. Which is strange, because they have bragged multiple times of using ML to automatically classify areas and coloring them correctly, but it's only used when zoomed out.

Compare these images and see which map style you prefer: https://imgur.com/a/419XB50

Here Maps is best out of those screenshots, but none of them are great.

What I can't stand about Google Maps is how it hides so much stuff if you're not zoomed in 1000x. The worst time was when I was trying to trace a 100km long logging road in northern British Columbia to get to a provincial camp site on a lake, but as soon as I zoomed out to get a broader picture it would disappear. Even though that was the only road within a 15 km radius. Nope, you can only see a 1km section at a time, and it's so thin and low-contrast that it's barely visible.

Next time you need to map out roads like that, try Caltopo. For any _map_ use cases, things like Caltopo and Gaia are miles better. Google Maps is great for following directions they give you, or finding businesses and well known places, but it's a horrible map in any other context.

There is of course a reason for Google maps very low contrast visual style, the focus is not on being a road map: https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-appl...

This is interesting as ~3 years ago, I made the switch to Apple Maps because Google Maps started becoming something like "Google Travel" instead.

As someone who enjoyed smaller screens, the app started getting cluttered with attractions, reviews, and various icons in way of UI and map elements.

I would switch to Apple Maps if there was an easy way to use it on Windows. Apple has no supported Maps website, though you can view Apple Maps through DuckDuckGo. But that's clunky and doesn't solve my use case of mapping routes on my desktop computer and then pulling them up in Apple Maps on my iPhone.

My biggest fear, that’s already half realized, is that enough mapping companies go out of business that a ton of map building knowledge just vanishes and it takes decades to have decent solution rise again when Maps finally goes under.

I fear that in particular for local mapping, as right now outside of OSM the only companies putting serious effort in maps are US and China based (to my knowledge at least)

Maps on Android for me became painfully slow. Every time I went to use it, I'd stare at a half-drawn screen for ages. I had a few year old flagship Android phone and that sort of experience was just silly. Google has heaped more and more into Maps, trying to make it do everything, and it has become a resource hogging monstrosity. When I open Maps, I want to quickly search for something and then likely navigate to it. Not wait for even the screen to get drawn, then wait for autocomplete, then wait for the map to draw, etc.

There are also some really bizarre choices in how the UI works. I don't remember exactly, but I believe when you search, you get a wildly zoomed out regional view, and then when you click on a specific result...you're still stuck at the very zoomed out view. So in order to see if you clicked on the right result, you have to pull the map waaaaaay in.

I just found myself baffled at how bad the usability was. Did the people running Maps actually watch people using their product?

Maps was solid but I'm so sick of seeing: this alternative route will get you there 2 hours slower.

so like, google lives in LA?

Google would have to break up with me.

I own Google stock, I have Google Nest security, Chromecast, Chromebook, Pixel phone, Google Voice, YouTube Music, YouTube TV,... Google Domains... Google Router, ... I had Google Waves, G+, Google Video (before they acquired YouTube), Orkut, ...

I just try to be pragmatic. Google didn't have an easy option to just video chat with my wife with one click so I just bought an iPad to FaceTime.

I forgot about Google Inbox, I loved that. Google Reader RIP. Google Desktop Search was great, especially how you could extend it. Google Answers (that's how my Google Account was verified)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com