It would seem the geekworld’s favorite helper-to-hate, Clippy, has gotten a job at Google’s GMail division. You can see his influence in the new look, with it’s unhelpful way of showing and hiding buttons, assuming you can’t keep track of who your friends are by name, nor really want to see your big screen monitor actually full of useful information.
Hopefully someone will notice, and fire his ass, before it’s too late =p
I am not a fan of the ‘new’ look for Gmail.
And it would seem I’m not alone in that distaste.
But Google did user testing, and they all said they liked the changes. Thing is, if you read their explanation of the testing, you’ll notice that “Stay the same” wasn’t ever on the table for fellow googlers, so it seems kind of dishonest to claim feedback was positive there. And any outside usability group you put together was inevitably going to be filled only with people who like to try new things. People who don’t like change aren’t going to sign up, so no matter how diverse by age, gender, etc your group was, it wasn’t a representative sample of the actual user base, and gives you no data about how the change would be received at large.
It would seem that some of the feedback is getting through, slowly.
But some of the worst offenses aren’t ever going to go away, no matter how many people complain, because they would interfere with the big Facebook-ification that is their ultimate goal. I get it, you want people to use Google+. Thing is, I’m not going to post everything twice, and everyone is already on Facebook, so that’s where that stuff goes. I have gigs of pictures and metadata on flickr, and that’s where that stuff goes.
Trying to mimic Facebook is a bad idea. Fads come and go. Instead of trying to reproduce the look of someone else’s website, Google should have been trying to build a tool that integrates all the social platforms seamlessly. I would kill for something that let me post my pictures to Flickr, and my words to my own blog, and lets me control how that gets shared with fine grained control, then automatically takes care of the minutia of which service which person is on. That would be good. Not evil.
I don’t get why google has both buzz and plus, or at least hasn’t integrated them better. Then again, I’m still trying to figure out a way to have the autonomy of a private blog, while somehow integrating it into the whole facebook/g-plus social sphere, without simply reposting everything three or more places each time. As is, I upload hundreds of photos to my flickr account, pick the perfect shot to make a wordpress post here, plus a facebook post, and it all seems so makeshift.
Two different people invited me to google+, so I figured what the heck. It’s a little annoying the way it keeps putting up a red box on my gmail tab saying “1″ notification, but when I click on it, it isn’t showing me anything that hasn’t already been viewed/responded to.
Finally, some one makes an interface change that improves my life instead of driving me nuts with annoyance. I just noticed this morning, in gmail, the action buttons stay at the top of the screen while you are scrolling, instead of being static parts of the page that aren’t visible for any message longer than a single page.
So thanks, whatever unpaid intern probably made the change =)
Put in “sole”, it translates correctly as “sun”.
Put in “mio”, it translates correctly as “my”.
Put in “sole mio”, it translates correctly as “my sun”.
Put in “o sole mio”, and it gives up and just returns “o sole mio”.
UPDATE: Looks like it’s an intentional ‘feature’ for anything it thinks is a song title? It does the same thing for “frere jacques”. It will display the correct translation for “frere” right up until you add the ‘u’ to jacques, at which point it just transcribes instead of translating.
UPDATE2: Looking through the translator forums, it looks like it also helpfully corrects political commentary, translating “hasina is bad” into the Bengali equivalent of “hasina is good”. According to the poster who discovered this, this action reflects a local government policy of silencing dissent. So much for “don’t be evil”.
Got my invite to the google music beta this morning and started trying it out.
The initial scan of my media library went fairly quickly, in part because it looks like they are just doing a search for media files by type during the first pass, and not actually attempting to parse them until they add them to your library. This of course means that it gives me the annoying “we’re going to load a random selection of your library because it’s too big for us”, with no way to tell it which tracks/artists/albums to prioritize. And the loading process is slow. It’s been running since 8am this morning and is only 900 songs in (it says it’s going to load 20,000 eventually). It’s not clear if checking the “free music” buttons during setup means I’ve given up some of the 20k slots to their music, or if I’ll end up with 20k of mine plus the freebies. In another 80 hours we will see where things are at, I guess.
UPDATE: 27 hours later and we’re all the way up to 7000 songs.
It’s also not impressing me with the way it randomly decides to split an album into two entities even though all the visible metadata matches. While editing metadata for an individual track was obvious, it’s not clear how to merge two albums that should be one, or to fix the same data for multiple tracks at the same time.
Will have to give a fuller evaluation once it’s finished the loading process, and I can see how well they select from my music.
Please implement a whitelist system for my phone. Any call I get that doesn’t correspond to an existing contact should go straight to voice mail.
Thanx
Wired has announced the google ebooks store, and google has a link to download the app, but iTunes must not have gotten the message they were going live today; it fails any request with “not available in the U.S.” error message. lol
The android app is downloadable already. So far it’s nothing special; you use the browser to look for books, it does support background downloading. On the one book I tested so far, Tom Robbins – Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, the title pages are not in color, and are displayed as tiny thumbnail sized images in a sea of white.
I was kind of hoping there was some obvious way to add your own books and take advantage of the sync feature, but if there is, I haven’t found it yet. The google help page for the app has a link to the forums, except the forum they send you to doesn’t exist yet. Maybe it’s the time I spent in the music biz, but I’m always unimpressed by such significant issues with release synchronization. It’s like they don’t even have a checklist of things to make sure got setup correctly by go-live-date.
UPDATE: A couple hours later (9am Pacific) and the iphone app is available now too.
I’m hoping that they are planning on using their massive google-powers to track how often those unsubscribes end up generating more spam, rather than less.