New Google Sheet on half of 13.6" MacBook Air screen is fully covered by popups
imgur.com
imgur.com
Huge companies are the absolute worst offenders for crap like this. Seriously, have you ever tried using Facebook to manage business pages? It is unbelievably poor.
Google is by far the most hypocritical, however, because their search engine ranks pages lower for UX sins like "cumulative layout shift" while at the same time committing those sins themselves.
(Having said all that, I would not personally expect an online spreadsheet app to look great on "half a 13" screen" on first load.)
Blame it on Kennedy Gmail rollout which started the waste-the-space movement.
Android is also quite a space waster compared to iOS. It's much less comfortable to use a small Android than a small iOS device.
Now in terms of reading I'm sure you're right, but on small iOS devices the bounding boxes around certain buttons are so unbelievably tight that I even see people who've been using an iPhone mini for years still have to press 4 times to get them to register. Never had that issue with small Androids.
Just the goddamn top bar in Android consumes (used to?) 30% of screen in landscape.
Unfortunately, only old ones. For Samsung, S8 is when the phones got really big. S7 (5.1 inch) and earlier were smaller than the iPhone 13 mini (5.4) My first Android was the original Galaxy S - comparitively tiny, but I definitely didn't struggle as much to tap buttons as on the 13 mini.
It’s been my mission to get this damn Facebook page out of my life. I have no business having anything to do with it, especially now. Every few months I manage to wrangle someone from Marketing to take it off my hands, but most of the time it takes me at least half an hour for me to work out how to even grant someone else permission to manage the page. This is AFTER I find the official Facebook help article for this process.
Through a combination of the Marketing person losing interest, and my ineptitude, I think I only managed to actually close this one off a few weeks ago. There’s every chance that in a few months I’ll find out that I didn’t do it properly.
I’m in my late 20s. I understand this generation of social networks. I was a very heavy Facebook user up until a couple of years ago. I’m not some clueless old idiot. This isn’t an operation that Facebook has any incentive to ‘hide away’. I can’t possibly see how this is anything other than egregious incompetence on Meta’s part. They’re simply too big to make…anything, anymore.
If I want to learn about new features I'll go to the Help menu.
But then how will the product manager make the chart go up and to the right?
No you won’t. There’s nothing wrong with announcing new features, as long as it’s not disruptive and obnoxious, like a pop up. Linear[1] for example adds a small insert at the bottom of the sidebar. It doesn’t take too much space, it’s easy to close, and you can ignore it for as long as you want, it doesn’t prevent you from working. IMO this is the right way to show new features.
[1]: https://linear.app
Even though it had the feature added 2 years ago, but you weren't notified and never bothered to look.
In 2024 it's still like that. Only inbox no news or weather.
I have to admit, I've just closed the tab a few times instead of acquiescing to click "got it".
Mice (and even touchpads) are very precise pointing devices compared to a toddler's chunky fist. Modern UIs are created assuming you'll be using fingers to interact with them. Mice are an afterthought.
There’s no reason why I need 20,000 items on the screen at the same time. Fewer but more legible items are better. I can scroll for more.
Displays with less than 100 dpi are still widespread, and today's software and web pages have far more padding and wasted space than they did 20 years ago. A 21" 4:3 CRT back then was at least as usable as a 27" 16:9 LCD today despite the newer displays having twice as many pixels. 17" displays in any aspect ratio are frustrating to the point of uselessness on today's desktops, but were fine in the '90s. The UI bloat is real whether you measure in pixels or inches, and very strongly correlated with the rise of touchscreens.
I'm reasonably sure most spreadsheet power users would have the opposite preferences to you. I do, for one. Data density is everything in non-trivial spreadsheets.
Of course it is, because of 'mobile first!' Anything else is just more work, and a cost center. So f... it!
It’s one of the few things that Apple is doing well at, but they’re doing really well at it.
from:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node/textCo...
Don’t try to pretend that any more than 1% of the people at Google are actually doing anything that moves even the slightest needle, regardless of ‘rank’.
They are playing the same playbook as Google+. Soon we'll be forced to use Gemini to open Sheets in a tone-deaf IVR voice "If you could tell me a few words about what you're opening Sheets about, I can better direct your experience."
I almost think they want people to hate AI so they think it's garbage and don't switch to using chat.com vs google.com for searching which has been scary how much better it is without all the ads and the relevance to what you want to find.
It’s a shame that Google is being run by marketers rather than engineers. And I say that as a marketer. When engineers were running the company this shit didn’t happen. Now we’re watching the inch by inch trench warfare of various teams at Google vying for quarterly KPIs and it sucks bad.
I anxiously await the next Google to usurp what Google has become, which is a kinda of proto IBM/GE.
2) one of the popups is an ad for their ai thing, but it has a huge close button and supposedly shows once.
3) the other popup is showing you that google has added easy table templates (and from what i have seen those types of tables are like 90% of google sheets uses)
1446x1534 should be enough to see actual content
Linking to a thread on x shows you 4 pop overs. One with a notice, the second showing a cookie advice and two of them asking you to register, while one of the two is overlapping another register element on the side. I wonder if the ones in charge are even trying to offer a reasonable ux?
I.e. reducing compatibility with Excel to make it harder to just leave with your data.
I could be wrong.