Google Video Shows All-White Redesigns For Gmail, Google Photos, and More (arstechnica.com) 105
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.
Re: Material Design Sucks (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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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.
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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?
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You certainly can, but the text gets quite unreadable.
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I meant in the composite output.
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Quite good i suppose.
I bet there are some color combinations that are just unreadable, but probably none with an all white background.
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To promote development of apps used to turn it all to "night" mode.
Perhaps even time and location dependent.
Re:Material Design Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Because stupid hipster designers have to ruin everything. God forbid any modern app be usable, it must only be stylish.
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Tail fins on cars is a good example of this: http://historygarage.com/futur... [historygarage.com]
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Re: Material Design Sucks (Score:1)
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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.
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By making it even less intuitive, they're increasing the use of their search engine, which means more advertising revenue for them. Simple.
Genius!
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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.
Light-grey text on white?! (Score:5, Insightful)
What is this horrible fascination with light grey text on white backgrounds?
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Recall NeXT, Mosaic, web-safe colors. Type that was black.
The change could be for display, quality (lcd), a mobile phone? A push to natural colors?
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Opera and Brave being two as well of the top of my head.
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Spoof needed (Score:2)
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.
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Original Mac called, wants its look back (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org], 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.
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I suppose obfuscation can indeed increase ad clicks.
User: "Hmm, is this a button, or an ad?" *click*
Page: "Congratulations on your Lamborghini purchase!"
But why do pages intended to be for productivity copy the click-bait designs? Probably because "every one else is doing it".
My parents used to ask, "Just because everyone else is jumping off a cliff, does that mean you should also?"
Gullible UI/UX selectors will say, "Yes! Let me get a running start..."
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Honestly, it's just yet another symptom in the down slope to even shittier interfaces designed by morons where everything in the world is a tablet, phone, or webpage.
Everything from Windows to pretty much most native apps are suffering from this. Huge chunks of whitespace around things, unused space where they just don't put content, or dumbing down interfaces for teenagers with smart phones.
It's especially frustrating to be sittin
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My first "large" (meaning > 80x25 characters) computer screen used black and grey on white. That was in 1985. (SparcStation, not Mac) So here we are, a little > 30 years later, and we're sending you Back...to the Past!
(To be honest, you said grey on white, not black and grey on white. And you're right; on the old email design, there was a boldish/blackish font and a greyish font, and I think they were used to distinguish whether you'd read a particular message or not. Beats me how you're supposed
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Let's counter with an ethnic look. I personally dig Mayan art. [wikimedia.org] I can see it with a sort of Next Generation (Trek) feel.
Don't get me started ... (Score:2, Funny)
All white? The rich old white man approach?
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The problem with an all white design is... (Score:2)
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.
Re: The problem with an all white design is... (Score:3)
It called â Snowblindâ(TM). It occurs when the background is white, foreground is a few grayscale shades off-white and the screen, book or map is also within the same grayscale range.
Driving this occurs not only in whiteout snow conditions. It also happens in fog, cloud filled conditions in mountainous terrain and night time driving where inversions fill-in lower altitudes.
You develop blindness driving, then look down at you map or white phone depiction of a route and itâ(TM)s blind to you. Y
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That's the sound I started making when I first saw the design.
Re:Vintage Green on Black Must Be Revolutionary! (Score:4, Funny)
Anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Anyone surprised? (Score:4, Funny)
This is what happens when you move from providing a useful product to people with lots of options that are easy to configure. To providing a "tailored user experience" which tells you what they want you to hear, while hiding those useful options that were once easy to configure.
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Google home page - well okay, that one should be a lot of white space and a search box, I'll give them that one.
I prefer it with a lot of dark space and a search box. Thankfully, there are solutions for this. Imperfect ones, but better than the alternative.
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Aside from the white (Score:2)
I do like that they have moved the menu/search button to the bottom, where it's easily reachable one-handed.
Information loss (Score:2)
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.
I asked a friend if it was any good? (Score:3)
He said it was all-white. I thought he had a lisp.
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Rolling Sthones: "Ith all white now, in fact ith a gath!"
(This is after Barry Kripke joined the band)
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Settings -> Display Density -> Compact
Not quite as dense as pre-Material Design, but reasonably close.
obHitchhikersGuide (Score:3)
Because everybody was screaming for it (Score:2)
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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?
I think this is a factor in a lot of fields. Change for change's sake.
For example, we have to reinvent grade school education all the time. After all, the tried and true methods won't get anybody their PhD with "original research".
Blinding bright at 3AM (Score:2)
White vs black power usage (Score:2)
Whelp... (Score:2)
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.
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My eyes!!!! (Score:2)
"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.