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Google Video Shows All-White Redesigns For Gmail, Google Photos, and More (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: This year, Google is pushing out a major revamp to its Material Design guidelines. The new design language is slowly creeping across Google's portfolio, and so far we've seen big changes for Gmail.com, early builds of Chrome, and for Android P. The Android side of things has so far only been the base operating system, but now a new Google design video has surfaced that shows off new designs for Gmail, Google Photos, Google Trips, and Google Drive.
[...] The Gmail screens strip the app of its trademark red UI elements and give us a white bottom bar and white background. The phone inbox shows attached documents and even has large thumbnails for images. The message screen appears to show attachments on a horizontal scrolling carousel, which looks a lot like the horizontally scrolling news articles in the Google Feed. This screen again places the important controls down at the bottom of the screen, where a bottom bar houses the usual "Mark as Read," "Delete," "Archive," and "Reply All" buttons. We even get to see the compose screen for a second, which shows previous replies above your compose field.
[...] The Gmail screens strip the app of its trademark red UI elements and give us a white bottom bar and white background. The phone inbox shows attached documents and even has large thumbnails for images. The message screen appears to show attachments on a horizontal scrolling carousel, which looks a lot like the horizontally scrolling news articles in the Google Feed. This screen again places the important controls down at the bottom of the screen, where a bottom bar houses the usual "Mark as Read," "Delete," "Archive," and "Reply All" buttons. We even get to see the compose screen for a second, which shows previous replies above your compose field.
What is this horrible fascination with light grey text on white backgrounds?
Don't get me started ... .... insert various political references ...
All white? The rich old white man approach?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
that everything will have the colour #FFFFFF, which means everything will be invisible.
This reminds me of the Douglas Adams novel "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" when an electric monk got stuck because he believed everything was pink and therefore everything was indistinguishable from everything else, so he got stuck because he couldn't 'see' any obstacles, until he stopped believing it.
Otherwise you might be comfortable looking at it.
Hopefully they will put light gray text over the white background, white borders, and white title bar.
Maybe it is for better compatibility with CGA monitors, but even on those you get four fucking colors.
It's some sort of plot by Google to get people to quit using their services, I think.
Google Finance - used to be really good, loads of information, very useful. Now, it's a whole lot of white space with not a lot else. No need to visit that page any more.
Google News - used to be really good, loads of information, very useful. Now, it's a whole lot of white space with not a lot else. No need to visit that page any more.
Google home page - well okay, that one should be a lot of white space and a search box, I'll give them that one.
My eye strain! The amber CRT screens do nothing!
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It started out with the horrible fascination with the "flat" style whereby it was hard to tell buttons from boxes etc. It was hard to use, but art trumped* function.
But they were not satisfied whacking shadows and shading, they had to whack colors also. At this pace, we'll go back to monochrome uni-spaced character-mode UI's. Keep your ASCII art; it may get you a promotion from a young PHB who won't realize it's from 1982. "Wow, this is so modern and stylish. Good job! And can I have a copy of that 'visi calc' software you showed me? It's totally cray!"
After all, I've seen disco come back twice in my lifetime. UI fads seem in the same category as clothing and music fads. Oh right, it's not "UI" but "UX" now. Experience this!:
Git off my flat light-grey lawn! (drought made such fashionable)
* "T" word not intended to be connected with you-know-who.
Table-ized A.I.
Let's counter with an ethnic look. I personally dig Mayan art. I can see it with a sort of Next Generation (Trek) feel.
Table-ized A.I.
To promote development of apps used to turn it all to "night" mode.
Perhaps even time and location dependent.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
An all white UI with invisible icons that need to be activated using weird gestures. When you hover the mouse in just the right way some parts of the display become pale grey.
If only I had the time to make it. But then again, maybe Google will do this for me in their next release.
I do like that they have moved the menu/search button to the bottom, where it's easily reachable one-handed.
Because stupid hipster designers have to ruin everything. God forbid any modern app be usable, it must only be stylish.
Gmail app redesign shows even less information than before. Years ago gmail app displayed about dozen emails on one screen. During the last redesign they limited it to 6-7 emails. This white redesign shows 3 (and a half) emails. This smells like a ploy to make people stop using it.
:wq
Gmail already requires that you Google how to do certain basic operations that are a single mouse click away on most mailers (right-click on the flat coloured area at the top right, then choose X, then click on the bottom part of the coloured region in the dialog, then hold down Alt + Ctrl and click on the thin line at the left, and hey presto, you've found Reply All). By making it even less intuitive, they're increasing the use of their search engine, which means more advertising revenue for them. Simple.
He said it was all-white. I thought he had a lisp.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No it isn't, it's awful, low contrast and very hard on the eyes.
Anything which is light text on dark background only works in dark basements with backlit keyboards.
No sig today...
"It's so ... white!" he said. "Like, white buttons and text on a white background. It's so white that light just seems to fall out of it!"
You Can turn on the keyboard control with gmail. Witch this enabled, "Reply to all" is done with pressing the "a" key. This is easyiest.
Or you could just click the "Reply All" button that's right below the email. It's conveniently between the "Reply" and "Forward" buttons.
Material Design sucks, but let's stick to the ways it actually sucks instead of making crap up.
Settings -> Display Density -> Compact
Not quite as dense as pre-Material Design, but reasonably close.
Or might it be because the GUI people have to justify their paychecks? How long has it been since the GUI problem, with the type of hardware generally used, has been solved? 15 or 20 years?
All these designers who think white backgrounds are a good idea should be forced to be oncall where they get paged every night at 2 or 3am and are forced to stare into a screen that has the brightness of a thousand suns so they can understand the pain I go through every time I have to do the same, which is most nights. And then maybe they will understand just how painful those white screens are when your eyes are adjusted to the dark and how once they adjust to the 8 million lumens of light you won't be getting back to sleep any time soon. This really needs to happen. Unsurprisingly, dark screens don't create the same kinds of problems, but do I get any dark screens at 3am? Listen, being oncall and getting paged in the middle of the night is bad enough, so let's not make it 10x worse with your stupid white screens, ok? Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
By making it even less intuitive, they're increasing the use of their search engine, which means more advertising revenue for them. Simple.
Genius!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Once you go Black, you ....are happy the text is white and you're saving battery power. DHUH
End of Line.
You certainly can, but the text gets quite unreadable.
This is getting worse and worse. I am going to be trying Zoho. Seen that pop up on this site a few times as recommendations.
I have held off trying to get a different email service just because of ALL the stuff attached to the GMail one.
My Google account is pretty much going to be for YouTube to unblock videos with bad words and the Play Store.
Unless there is a good replacement for that y'all can recommend.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
"The goggles do nothing!"
Everyone is going dark, even Youtube. I'm glad Google is doing something different but this is really straining my eyes.
They already sell junk hardware and claim it faster than the old stuff.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
If you work in an illuminated room then you simply adjust the "searchlight" to be the same brightness as your surroundings. It's not difficult.
Using a black background in even a moderately illuminated room wreaks havoc on your eyes. Try it. Look at your darkened screen for 20 seconds then look at a white wall. Notice anything?
No sig today...
I meant in the composite output.
Somebody over on Ars explained this: it's so you can use your GMail app as a flashlight. After all, it's not like you'll want to write your emails on this.
Tail fins on cars is a good example of this: http://historygarage.com/futur...
Quite good i suppose.
I bet there are some color combinations that are just unreadable, but probably none with an all white background.