A while back I did a lot of business travel and in that situation a watch with world time actually has real value. Same story with ergonomics- rushing through a crowded airport with luggage in one hand and documents in another, it is much more convenient to have a device strapped to your wrist rather than having to reach into your pocket. I think a 'hands-free' smart device will prove to be useful in many other unexpected ways, regardless of the screen size.
An addition to great points already made in this thread- in Emacs it might take a while to set up your environment to your liking but once you have done it you can use it for _everything_. From writing code to managing your agenda to writing haikus. As a user of Dvorak keyboard layout that alone is invaluable to me since I always have my shortcuts optimized for Dvorak no matter what I'm doing.
Thanks for this. Having forced to use the new design for a few days, the old one feels and looks so much better.
My biggest annoyance in the new one apart from the horrible colors was how the buttons change position or disappear depending on the context. Much less intuitive than the old design.
Its a shame that Google decided to force the new design, I would just leave the old one as optional as it was during the past few months.
The old design will completely go away in the next few days. From a development perspective it's just not feasible to make everything work for two different designs (with many many themes). It's better to spend the time on cool new features.
Thanks for the answer. Based on the discussion here, one especially cool new feature would be a 'classic' mode that would mimic the look and feel of the old design :)
It's not possible to please everyone when you do a UI change and have 300+ million users, but we do try to fix some issues people have with the new design (e.g. setting for text buttons, high contrast theme). Of course it has to look consistent with other products so there are some limitations.
Our community manager wrote a much more eloquent answer to that topic on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/sk7i7/how_do_you_get...
The link was an interesting read, and you make a valid point that some of the issues have been solved by features like the button texts.
Actually my point was exactly that everyone seems to have their own favorite thing they miss about the old design. So for me it would make more sense to build a mode (on top of the new codebase) that would mimic the old design instead of implementing fixes one-by-one. Then everyone who liked the old design better could just change one setting that is easy to find and be done instead of playing with bunch of individual settings in different menus to achieve the same thing. I think it would stop a lot of complaints even if it would not be perfect.
I understand that there might be very good reasons why it is not feasible, this is just my 2 cents.
If you can still get in, it might not be too late to catch up. Obviously, you can submit all of the homework on time, but if you're score on the final is greater than your homework score, than they just use the final as your grade.
I'm quite impressed that your suggestion was accepted, in the company where I work this would never happen.
An example: I was asked to build a system to keep track of daily tasks of one of our teams, and to make sure all scheduled tasks were assigned to someone. As I was listening to them, I suddenly realized that the magnetic white-board on the meeting room wall was all they needed. I drew a table with team-members names and weekdays and used the magnets as tasks.
After some silence the team supervisor said it would work, but would not be used because:
a) it looks 'unprofessional';
b) it's 'insecure' because someone could mess up the magnets by accident
After some emails between my manager and them my colleague was ordered to build the system, he ended up spending about 3 weeks on it :)
It was a relatively small company and people really tried their best to solve problems in efficient ways. I think they missed the obvious solution purely by chance.
