Google is testing a stunning Gmail overhaul | Hacker News Reader

Google is testing a stunning Gmail overhaul

thenextweb.com

29 pointspandemicsyn11 comments

This is another step toward confirming my hypothesis: Google didn't kill Reader because they wanted to stop providing a feed-reader; Google killed Reader because RSS is a knock-off version of email. You can subscribe to regular updates on a topic over both RSS and email, but the updates that actually get read are the ones that hit your email inbox.

So, gradually, Google are transforming Gmail into a capable feed-reader. First they added the auto-categories; now they're rearranging everything into a single chronological feed.

I was an avid Google Reader but then moved to Feedly when they suicided it. After I deleted my Google Account, as one of the side-affects was losing access to my Feedly account because I signed up using Google Outh, I had to look for alternatives.

I then realised that I was looking at the problem all wrong. Really, all I wanted was an RSS-to-email application. As a joke I did an "apt-cache search rss2email". I found "rss2email" and so I installed it. I've never looked back.

As a side note I had to smile when I was looking at the man page for r2e after seeing who the author was.

I don't treat RSS like that, sometimes I'm too busy and don't check my RSS feeds and when I do I won't "catch up". I use email subscription to websites that I want to read every post.

Yes, and you use email subscriptions that way because email clients are bad at being feed readers: they effectively force you to "catch up" whenever you open them.

My point was that, with these changes, Google are making Gmail good at being a feed-reader--adding features to interact with subscription emails the way you currently interact with RSS feed items.

If your email client is good at being a feed reader, it will be sensible to use email subscriptions for things you currently use RSS feeds for.

1) I don't think it's possible this is the final version of the redesign, because there's no way Google would remove Hangouts visibility from gmail

2) It seems like hipster designers are competing to find new and flashy ways to waste enormous amount of my screen on useless whitespace

On #1: They might remove Hangouts from Gmail-on-Chrome if they planned to integrate them directly into Chrome/ChromiumOS. More likely, though, is that that button in the top-right corner isn't a drop-down, but rather represents a currently-collapsed Hangouts sidebar. That sidebar is probably expanded by default, like Facebook's.

On #2: it's well known that people have a bad experience reading extremely long (i.e. more than ~65em) lines of text. It's actually better to wrap a subject line onto several lines than to let it go on all the way across your 2560px screen. Ideally, web pages could just specify a maximum width you could stretch the browser out to. But, since they can't, they drop in some useless whitespace.

Whitespace is not necessarily useless.

I'm not one to hate on redesigns - I can't think of the last redesign that I didn't like but if this ships, or anything close to this ships I can categorically say that I will stop using the gmail web interface.

The information density in the current design is just what I want from an email client: http://cl.ly/image/0S2q0X0X3D3F

All I want is a fast, functional Gmail.

Any shine they want to put on it is fine by me.

Looks like a spaced out Outlook design. I actually like their current layout, except for configuring settings, that can be made more apparent.

Yeah color scheme threw me off at first. Thought it was outlook.com

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