Are You Liking the New Gmail and Google Reader Interface?
Google has been rolling out the new Google Reader and Gmail interface over the past few days. Few weeks ago, it overhauled the Google Docs interface and the changes made to Google Reader and Gmail is on those lines.
In this post, we will talk a bit about those changes and how it might impact your day-to-day usage of these tools. The changes are still being rolled out so you may or may not have it at the moment but you are likely to get the new interface soon enough.
The New Gmail Interface
You might remember one of our posts few months ago where we talked about calendar and Gmail’s new look. That was mainly the preview theme of Gmail and the new Gmail look is based on that theme.
The purpose of the new interface and the features is to reduce clutter and make certain Gmail’s features more accessible. It also introduces some nice customization options which lets you view your inbox in various ways.
Take a look at the following screenshot which shows an email conversation in the new Gmail. It definitely looks cleaner and better, don’t you think?
I’ll take up the new features in detail in a future post but from what it looks like, it isn’t bad. Of course it’s gonna take time to get used to it.. it is definitely a significant shift from Gmail’s previous interface you see.
The New Google Reader Interface
The new Google Reader interface hasn’t been received well by the audience and people have been very vocal in their criticism of the new interface. The primary reason behind this was the removal of friends and sharing features of Google Reader and integration of Google+ into that.
Integrating Google+ into Reader makes sense for Google, but sharing with friends in their Reader list was something that a lot of people did and they were quite annoyed when they found that it is no longer supported by the tool.
Apart from that, the interface is pretty much like the changes made to Gmail and Google Docs. More white, bigger buttons et al. I haven’t found the new Google Reader charming so far, primarily because it eats up a lot of screen real estate at the top where it has the orange subscribe button.
What about you? What are your opinions on the new Gmail and Google Reader? What do you like and dislike? Share in the comments.
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Mine is stuck in compact mode.
It’s okay by me. I prefer the compact mode for more real estate space. Mostly, I am not a fan of the ‘greyed out’ buttons. My eyes find it harder to find a place to rest on the page and have a harder time finding the options because of this washed-out-ness. We have been trained over the years that greyed out buttons are not available, so this UI takes a little bit to get used to (still not used to it). So overall, it’s okay to me. If they would bring back the colored icons I would be pleased.
I’m not sure I really *prefer* either; the old one worked, the new one works. The photos of the senders (or not, depending) does nothing for me, though I suspect it could add more to my personal Gmail than my work one (& it’s that I’ve changed for the time being).
Initially I didn’t like the spacing on the home page – till I realised it was defaulting to ‘comfortable’; where I prefer compact.
I would like to be able to increase the transparency (well, reduce actually!) on the list of messages, my background shows through too much [on the other hand, I like the new set of photos in the themed backgrounds, so it is nice to see them!])
I just wish, though, they’d taken the time to get a bigger space between ‘archive’ ‘delete’ & ‘spam’ – it’s too easy to hit the wrong one.
I suspect that in a few weeks, I won’t even remember it’s changed.
New Google Reader: Not sure the new development crew really understood how much users depended on sharing items or the old readers ability to create RSS feeds and use them on websites. The response time when paging down through news items is unacceptable. It seems to degrade proportional to the number of items being ‘paged’
While I understand Google needs to look at their products to see how they dove tail into Google + Google needs to understand the impact of suddenly dropping key functionality in their products (Reader, Newsgroups, etc) that doesn’t fit into the social push and offer reasonable alternatives. Let’s hope the recent Netflix’s arrogance is not repeated here and Google pays some heed to its strongest and influential promoters and supporters.
The new reader interface, I actually like it. It is clean and easy to read, and I never really used the sharing that much. I do like the Google+ integration, though.
My biggest problem is that it bogs down after 10-15 articles. I mean, really bogs down. I have plenty of memory on my desktop, and the new Reader often gets up to almost a GB of RAM and I have to kill it and reload.
It makes my reading experience not near as good as it was in the old one. Hopefully they are working on speed improvements and keeping the memory usage to a minimum, because it becomes unusable after about 10 minutes.
I used to use the Google Reader sharing feature, so I’m very sad that it’s gone…. I can’t figure out the Google Plus sharing – so perhaps you could do an article on it in future?
I read a whole lot of articles on different topics using Google Reader. They break down into at least three major categories;
- Movies
- Health
- Computers
What I really want to do is to mark interesting articles in Reader as being one (or more) of these groups. Then I want to be able to feed them to a list on each of my 3 associated blogger blogs to a “I’ve been reading recently….” panel.
Then I want to know what happens if I share these things on Google Plus. Do they write on other people’s walls? I don’t want to spam people’s walls unnecessarily.
Anything you can tell me about this would be greatly appreciated.
I kinda like the new interface, both for Gmail and Reader.
However, in the old Reader interface the borders were much more clear. Now I have to hover the mouse around to find the scrollbar for the list of feeds. A little more color, or even themes (as in Gmail) would be a lovely feature
I did not notice the slowing down in the new interface, while I used to have it in the old interface.
I love both redesigns very much and aside from the sharing feature in Google Reader, I don’t see that it’s intrinsically changed so much. As long as I can email stories to friends and post stories to Facebook and Google Plus, that’s good enough for me.
I feel the same way about Gmail. Most of it’s changes are cosmetic and I think the new look across all of Google’s products is a good one. It seems more contemporary and modern. Kudos to Google.
how do i get SELECT all button/link in gmail?
how do i “select all”messages checkboxes, eg to move items to trash
don’t want to individually check thousands of messages
rmpbklyn – There’s a drop-down box immediately on top of the checkboxes. Just click it and select “ALL”.
A few people have not liked that the buttons no longer are labeled, however, it doesn’t take long to remember which button does what. When in doubt, you can hover the cursor over it and it will tell you what that particular button does.