Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the features being migrated to another product.
It seems like Google became unable to innovate in the basic services they once revolutionized.
Then I went thru and tried all the competitors, new and old.
Quickly a few rose over what GR ever was and of them I settled with Inoreader - been a happy, paying customer ever since.
GR was holding down the evolution of feed readers by keeping theirs free. That was what, 5 million users not paying anybody for the service? When it was gone, things started moving forward again, fast. So actually, it's good that they closed GR.
Why do people rememeber it fondly? Was it the fact that it was web based, or was it the only/first RSS reader people have used?
I’ve always used NetNewsWire and it’s never let me down.
A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.
The page you're interested in doesn't offer a feed? Try the integrated web feeds from your reader or another source.
Now that's Gmail standard, though
you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.
Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.
It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder).
At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
Gmail's "threading" is probably its worst sin (beating out its weird IMAP interface). When I started using Gmail, my other mail client was mutt, but every other client at the time showed replies to email threads properly as a tree.
As an aside, you could argue that email conversations should look like a DAG (since you could totally quote multiple emails and have multiple In-Reply-To headers, why not) but I'm not aware of any clients that did that.
Gmail went a third way, completely linearizing a thread into a "conversation". This view makes it harder to have discourse over email: if you want to make sure to split a conversation and have both forks get addressed, you have to change the subject line to un-thread replies to your message.
I don't recall it being that much better than the competitors. And even today it seems like a coin toss as to whether an obviously spam email lands in the spam folder or not. Not to mention the seemingly shady backroom deals companies like Sendgrid, SES, etc. are making to ensure their emails get delivered to the inbox. That seems like an area ripe for corruption.
> At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
Anecdotal, but I very much preferred Thunderbird to Gmail, and was using it up until 2010 or so. Nowadays I use K-9 Mail (Android) where I need to and try to avoid the disaster that is modern email as much as possible.
Google Mail's spam filtering is many things, but I don't see why it's been particularly effective. Adaptive spam filtering was already being done before GMail came along, and unlike GMail's approach, the filters in other popular email clients didn't lurch so far towards avoiding false negatives that they all but broke normal email by having so many false positives.
I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar are relatively unobtrusive.
Only downside so far was I had to cancel my NYTimes sub (honestly probably a plus) because it doesn't recognize the @fastmail.com domain as a valid email address. It's the only service I've had that problem with, including the important ones like banking, etc.
I'd advise anyone to use their own domain, but those aliases can be a godsend.
I was unable to sign up for an Etsy account with Fastmail. They only acknowledge the majors. But I was able to sign up with gmail and then promptly change it to fastmail. Really sophisticated opsec on their part.
I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most.
Maybe for people that only ever used Gmail it's okay, because they are used to its weirdness and have never seen a more structured and visually appealing way to read email.
Maybe the lesson here is that if you use one of them for years, then the other seems really bad.
Also, if you want to talk about bad UX on Google products, I could write a book on frustrations I have with using Maps.
A few days ago I tried to install Google Chat, for work. There's no download buttons to be found, you're just logged into Chat directly and is greeted by a "You need Chrome to download Chat". Well that just weird, but okay, I can uninstall Chrome afterwards, no problem. Imagine my surprise when launching Chat also launched Chrome. I disregard this as being something Chat just do on first launch. Existing Chrome however also closed Chat.... Okay. Uninstall Chrome then, that should teach Chat to no fool around with Chrome. Now Chat doesn't work, because what Google doesn't tell you is that Chat is now a progressive web app. The icon is pretty though.
Chat can be a web app all it want, but it doesn't get to launch Chrome, I don't want that abomination running all day. The current fix is apparently to install via Home Brew, that downloads a stand-alone app. Google claims the new version is stand-alone, but if it was to launch Chrome it's not really stand-alone is it.
What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs.
Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms?
Facebook gave up on the one app and does native apps for the major phones for a reason: native is faster, ultimately more powerful and you have more control to fix bugs.
...But it's still better than Google telling the parent they have to install Chrome to install Google Chat.
The majority of the underlying libraries wouldn't necessarily need to be changed; "only" the UI layer and some of the APIs (which is non-trivial, but doable).
and yet the latest-and-greatest cross platform framework is supposed to be Flutter
In case anyone was wondering why Apple is going with the "iOS/iPadOS apps on the desktop" route, it's because this is so incredibly common; great, first-class mobile apps and nearly unusable, garbage Electron-based desktop apps.
Edit: Plus, in regards to Google, something about Chromebooks. A good desktop app on a Chromebook is just a web app that works well in Chrome. Why make a desktop app for what they seem to think is just an outdated computing metaphor using APIs they don't control?
My aunt is pretty locked to Google platforms, she is the person who trains their platforms at her work... and you know what, the idea that she could "just use Skype" didn't even strike her mind:
It's already installed on my grandma's Windows PC, she already has a Microsoft account anyways, and it "just works", popping up a "[aunt] is calling] dialog when she gets a call. Skype worked great, and it's available on every platform.
It really starts to amaze me that Google doesn't understand the importance of that level of integration and simplicity considering their supposed market being "everyone". My aunt had been considering buying a Google Home/Nest/whatever it is today or an Android tablet, just to use one app to call my grandmother.
But my grandmother already has her PC open, and Skype "just works". It rings like a phone and it has a big green button to answer it.
For a search company, it's embarrassing how hard it is to search for things in their office suite.
We inadvertently ended up with a weird heirarchy like A -> B -> C, where A was owned by user 1, B was owned by user 2, and C was owned by user 3, and everything was just shared with everyone else.
Then one day while cleaning up the account of a user who had left, I inadvertently un-shared "myself" (her account) from everything that everyone had shared with her.
This apparently resulted in her Drive account going through everything that had been shared with her and removing it from the directory it was in. In this case, Drive un-shared C to her, removing it from B, then un-shared B from her, removing it from A. Now all of those files still existed, and were still shared to everyone else, but there was no hierarchy to them anymore, at all.
This was a completely massive pain in the ass, meaning that one of our project managers had to recreate the entire directory structure, then go through every document that their knew of, search for it in their Drive, find what folder it was in, and then put it into the right place in the hierarchy.
Thankfully, they were the kind of person who had wanted to go through and reorganize for years, so aside from the sudden and completely unmanagable imposition on their time, they were pretty stoked to have a reason to deal with it. I, on the other hand, learned to just never touch Drive at all and migrate everyone to Team Drives instead.
Which it turns out you can't safely share to users outside of your organization. Fucking great. Thanks, Google.
Where Google Drive promised in the past "unlimited" storage, I can now provide for myself for cheaper and better.
I see this opinion a lot, but Apple Maps is pretty great now. Bing Maps is excellent. HERE Maps has been a big one I relied on for a number of years too.
I mean, their web UI is slow, but MapQuest... actually still does it's job pretty darn well too. I used their API for a program I wrote.
If you had used anything but Google, you'd realize everyone else has these features too.
Bear in mind, Bing Maps powers a world-scale reproduction of the world for Flight Simulator... you thought that didn't have 3D models of buildings? It does have to fill in a lot of missing data, but it does start on a very good foundation.
- Apple Map : Better street view than Google. The scenes look more natural and having a higher point of view is much better but the point of interest is quite unfocused and their map app acts quite weirdly and very laggy under 3D and almost unusable. Funny their UI guideline always says not to block UI process but they can't do that themselves.
- Bing map : Map is very good. Point of interest is fairly placed but their satellite view is very rough in Japan. Searching is weird. If I search for "California" I get taken to some location in Columbia with that name... And not sure how they don't support Android? I get redirected to their search site when I visit maps.
- HERE map : I suppose this is US only? I checked a Japanese location and there's 1 big road in a major city and nothing else...
- MapQuest : Not really competing...
All in all, there are a few better things here and there for other maps, but nothing really beats the overall quality of Google maps at this point.
HERE is based in Chicago, so it's possible I have a drastically better experience with this than average. I probably get their best as a local resident. As for who they are: They got bought up by a big auto conglomerate, you'll find their software on a lot of car nav systems. (EDIT: It's actually based in the Netherlands, but there's a pretty big Chicago team. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Technologies and https://www.builtinchicago.org/company/here-technologies)
I'd be pretty surprised if Bing Maps doesn't support Android, given that's Microsoft's recommended mobile platform. I haven't used an Android in years though.
I use Apple when I use Maps these days, but that's because it's already on my phone and it's been good enough every rare occasion I've needed it.
It works in Mac Chrome. No workaround that I can find.
This is a regression from say, 2 years ago. I used to be psyched that I could use GDocs for work but now I hate that I'm forced to use it for work.
Started using Google Drive for work in around 2011 and stopped last year when I moved to a Microsoft-based company. In that time it didn’t seem like there were any major improvements in functionality to the core Drive, Docs and Sheets (and poor, forgotten Draw) apps. In fact most changes made things worse.
Drive’s search is so poor that it’s often easier to get a colleague to resend the invite to a doc than it is find the thing via search.
Docs is pretty much stagnant, with the only noticeable new feature being the section navigator on the side.
Gmail went from being a stunning demonstration of the possibilities of web technologies to a bloated, over-JavaScripted hog that takes ages to load.
Chat services came and went but none of them were particularly better than their predecessors. Just a slightly different arrangement of deckchairs.
It’s amazing that Google have left room for competitors like Airtable, Notion and Miro to both flourish and fulfil some of Google docs’ early promise.