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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting.

Could you please tell me what you like about it? I have very mixed feelings leaning towards unpleasantness (where the hell is CC and why does it take more than one click?).

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I also cannot stand their forum UI. Things seem to be of almost arbitrary size and color. For example, deleted messages in the listing view are centered, bold and colored. [1] This draws your attention to the deleted message first, which is nearly useless information.

Their hierarchy of boards & topics is confusing, too. There are two different types of hierarchy, but why? They are all clickable and filterable, yet they are almost visual opposites of each other [2].

These are just two, to me, glaring things. The UI is also crazy busy for something I would have though Google would have distilled and simplified.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/wwvyv3W.png

[2] http://i.imgur.com/RPFTLPP.png

It's buggy too. I get this nice error message in an alert dialog "ERROR: Possible problem with your *.gwt.xml module file. The compile time user.agent value (gecko1_8) dos not match the runtime user.agent value (unknown). Expect more errors."

oh! somebody forgot to uncomment all gwt "engines" before comitting :P

What I like about google forums? Almost nothing.

I don't know what CC is.

edit: OH, I get it

I like Gmail because of the threaded view. It's old hat nowadays but the fact remains that the threaded view is quite simply leagues better than old-school email inbox views.

I'm not saying it can't be improved, but it's a very good ux. I even like the new compose, once I got used to it.

As for CC... why do you need it? Just add the address to the "To:" field. The result is the same. The only time you need to put it in a different field is for BCCs, and quite frankly I imagine most don't use that feature.

Pine has had conversation threading since 2002. Mutt has had conversation threading since at least 2003.

I'm just saying, the original Gmail UI guys were inspired by good email clients. :)

You mean Pine, the hideous ncurses client that stopped being developed in 2005?

Yes

When I've looked at gmail, I've found the threading unbearable. The whole concept of email threading is probably a personal preference in the first place, but gmail appears to just group email with the same subject together, which is totally brain dead and renders it unusable for me. Mail.app is just a nicer alternative, for me.

> As for CC... why do you need it? Just add the address to the "To:" field. The result is the same.

It's true that to a mail server routing the email, yes, the result is the same. That doesn't mean the distinction is pointless, as it carries semantic information useful to the human recipients. The difference between To: and Cc: is the difference between 'I'm talking to you' and 'I'm talking to X, but you can/should listen in (and I want X to know you can listen in)'.

(To be clear, I actually have no problem with the gmail compose window's implementation of cc and bbc - it does only take one click).

well to me - if I am CC'ed in conversation it means as FYI or "I'd like to hear your opinion", "I hope you don't mind" or similar, i.e. I am on CC just to stay informed, not to actively be on conversation, also sometimes informs the receiver that this is known to someone else. Other case when 2+ parties with several participants in each are agreeing on something/negotiating it resembles semantic conversation much better you send email with TO set to other parties (you say them this) and CC your colleagues (they hear this and stay in conversation). Btw, and I don't like when people don't include all recieptients when replying, Gmail somehow promotes this

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