Former Gmail Design Lead and Cofounder of Inbox Releases a Free Chrome Extension To Simplify Gmail Interface (fastcompany.com) 71
An anonymous reader shares a report: Michael Leggett is even more annoyed with Gmail than you are. "It's like Lucky Charms got spewed all over the screen," he says to me, as he scrolls through his inbox. It's true. Folders, contacts, Google apps like Docs and Drive -- and at least half a dozen notifications -- all clutter Gmail at any given moment. And of course, there's that massive Gmail logo that sits in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Just in case you forgot that you just typed "gmail.com" into your browser bar three seconds ago. "Go look at any desktop app and tell me how many have a huge fucking logo in the top left," rants Leggett. "C'mon. It's pure ego, pure bullshit. Drop the logo. Give me a break."
Rather than sit there and stew, Leggett decided to do something about it: He created a free Chrome extension called Simplify, where all the extraneous folders and functions overloading Gmail seem to melt away, leaving you with a calm screen and nothing but your messages. It's understatedly beautiful, and every button just seems like it's in the right place. In fact, it feels a little too good for some random free Chrome extension made by some random developer. Let's just say that Leggett was highly qualified for the job. You see, Leggett was actually the lead designer for Gmail from 2008 to 2012. He also cofounded the since-discontinued Inbox, which attempted to reimagine Gmail for the modern era.
Rather than sit there and stew, Leggett decided to do something about it: He created a free Chrome extension called Simplify, where all the extraneous folders and functions overloading Gmail seem to melt away, leaving you with a calm screen and nothing but your messages. It's understatedly beautiful, and every button just seems like it's in the right place. In fact, it feels a little too good for some random free Chrome extension made by some random developer. Let's just say that Leggett was highly qualified for the job. You see, Leggett was actually the lead designer for Gmail from 2008 to 2012. He also cofounded the since-discontinued Inbox, which attempted to reimagine Gmail for the modern era.
Here is an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Use a real email client instead of this web-based crap. Problem solved.
Re: (Score:1)
You mean, where you can create FOLDERS too?!?!
Re: Here is an idea (Score:1)
Do you think such a tool would make it possible to manage several email addresses on a single screen ? With folders, filters and no ads ? That would be awesome.
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I'm pretty sure Sherlock goes to the bathroom like everyone else.
Re:Here is an idea (Score:4, Informative)
yes, been using Thunderbird for over ten years now, works great, less filling.
Re: (Score:2)
I actually like a web based email client. And unfortunately GMail still seems to be the best there is. That doesn't mean that is is perfect though. It has gained a lot of "features" over the years that I strongly dislike.
But OTOH desktop email clients are also far from great. I am using Thunderbird because it is the best I could find, but again, it's far from being good. It has improved again a bit lately after several years of becoming worse with each update.
HTML Interface (Score:5, Interesting)
I use the HTML interface for Gmail and like it's simplicity and lack of clutter.
Re: HTML Interface (Score:1)
I use the thunderbird interface, much better.
Re: (Score:3)
I use the HTML interface for Gmail and like it's simplicity and lack of clutter.
Yeah. I read :
Just in case you forgot that you just typed "gmail.com" into your browser bar three seconds ago
and thought "3 seconds? Really? It takes my browser a full 15 seconds for gmail to load with all the bells and whistles turned on!"
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
My Gmail screen doesn't look like his 'before' example. Maybe I've just turned off most of the annoying features - but I sure didn't require a plugin to achieve a clean screen (unless AdBlock Plus is cleaning it up for me). Acutally, I just clicked on the 'hangouts' icon at the bottom left, and now I have a signin prompt I can't get rid of. Oh well, it was clean before that... ;-)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, wait. I can go to settings-chat-hide, and remove that whole section. So, this guy is what? Creating a plug-in to turn off features that you can already disable in Settings? Brilliant! I guess he hopes to turn his "I worked on Gmail" cred into a new business selling plugins. Or giving away plugins that spy on you. Or maybe, he's just providing a free plugin out of the goodness of his heard - but then, why not just post instructions on how to configure Gmail and let people configure it to their liking...
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I think this is actually meant to draw attention to the company that he works for now. From the article:
"landing at Nori, a company addressing climate change with blockchain"
I laughed out loud when I read that line. The link leads to another FC article about Nori.
Re: (Score:2)
Blockchains are so 2018 though, we need something new, like AI powered blockchains !
You can't parody a company that's going to "address climate change with blockchain". They're way too far down that rabbit hole.
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I've a vastly superior Gmail interface myself: (Score:1)
It's called... IMAP(S).
Unfortunately it need a brain to operate, and apparently they're all out nowadays.
i checked the article (Score:1)
they should apply the same thing, remove the ads on both side and flashing stuff, use the width of the page for the article and they would have a much less cluttered design... but some people don't do what they preach...
Clearly demonstrates modern web design principles: (Score:1)
Whitespace. Lots of it. Forgive my ignorance but I don't want to dedicate >23% of my screen to empty nothingness. No really, I used a measuring tape.
Maybe it's my Gmail theme but the logo takes 1% of the screen, the search box 8%, the navigation 11%, and the actual email list (in "comfortable" mode) 74%. I'm okay with that. In fairness I keep the tab fullscreen on a dedicated monitor so maybe my use case isn't the target?
Re: (Score:2)
That was my experience just now too. I'd already set a bunch of the interface options, and on a 1920 by 1200 screen I had an awful lot of whitespace, distractingly so.
There are a few more colorful buttons on the conventional compact view than I'd like but they're less distracting than huge whitespace columns.
Give me Firefox version (Score:2)
I mean.. Sure convenience is a thing but if you kinda care about what Google do whatsoever why not run Firefox? Like I do. But then how to use the extension? =P
Re: Give me Firefox version (Score:2)
I agree. I don't use Chrome any longer unless I absolutely have to. I only use Firefox now for all my systems. Would love to see this ported.
Love it !! Thank you !!! (Score:1)
Does it make it faster? (Score:3)
Ever since the new improved Gmail interface last year it's been dog slow compared to the original design.
Re: (Score:1)
Same with youtube and a number of other google domains. Every site uses this horrible 'late loading' paradigm where they first render a bunch of grey filler elements before rendering the actual elements because...they don't want to show a partially rendered page I guess? I don't know why, but it makes their properties pointlessly slow, painfully in some cases.
It reminds me of a time I wrote a loading screen for a small game back in the early 2000's. After doing some testing I realized that the loading sc
Covering vs simplifying (Score:5, Interesting)
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However, if you were to actually try downloading and using it, as I have done, you'd see that the extraneous elements are indeed removed, not just covered up. The reason it doesn't look that way is because he sets a maximum width on the list of messages, so if you make your window too wide it'll end up with white
a couple of points (Score:5, Interesting)
1) in fact, all it seems to do is MASK those graphical annoyances, it just leaves empty space behind? So how useful is that? I mean, yes, if the giant GMAIL logo offends thee, let it be struck from thine sight! But utilitywise, this is pretty pointless. For example, the text of the email that's shown in a single line preview is still constrained by those invisible graphic elements (now it's just empty screen, instead of stretching the lines to show more information).
2) I can just see the /. story tomorrow: malicious former gmail programmer infects 18million machines in 20 minutes with clever gmail plugin ruse masking keylogger and rootkits.
Irony... (Score:3)
I find it at least a bit ironic that an article about simplifying an interface and getting rid of unnecessary clutter and garbage is hosted on a site that feels it necessary to load a bunch of javascript (and likely other things) from 10+ other domains...
Whitespace addict (Score:2)
Designed with mobile in mind (Score:2)
This is somehow unusual to you? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Go look at any desktop app and tell me how many have a huge fucking logo in the top left," rants Leggett. "C'mon. It's pure ego, pure bullshit. Drop the logo. Give me a break."
(Sigh.)
<soapbox>
So, the first thing wrong with this rant is that Gmail isn't actually a desktop app... it's a web-app. Upon reading that line, I promptly toggled through the dozen or so web-apps that I use most frequently; all of them have site-logos in that exact same spot. Every. Last. One. (To add insult to injury, most of them are actually bigger than the Gmail logo.)
Mind you, I'm by no means suggesting that Gmail is perfect; certainly I've levied my fair share of complaints against changes to which I objected myself over the years -- and of course, it has frequently felt to me like those complaints were met with deaf ears, so there may be a decent amount of ego at play on the Gmail development team... but I would opine that Leggett chose the wrong whipping boy for his curse laden spiel. Surely he could have found something less obviously common on which to focus his ire?
Or, ya know, another really neat idea might be to take the high road, and skip the curses and insults entirely. It's not like they add to the discussion, after all.
</soapbox>
It's really strange and anoying... (Score:2)
Hold on (Score:1)
And of course, there's that massive Gmail logo that sits in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Just in case you forgot that you just typed "gmail.com" into your browser bar three seconds ago
Wait, does Gmail load in 3 seconds for some people?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, tell it to always load in basic HTML mode.
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Yep, 2.2 seconds for me.
Extensions tend to break things (Score:2)
The extension might work OK for now. But as Google makes tweaks, is the extension going to be able to keep up?