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New iGoogle Sucks!
I've been holding off on writing this for a while to see if the new iGoogle design would grow on me but it hasn't
In fact I think it sucks. Perhaps I am too stupid but I havn't figured out a way to get it back to the original layout except to change the language from EN to DE.
The most annoying new feature is the email. When I clicked on an email in the little email box it would direct me to google mail, now it opens my mail directly in the same window. That may be cool for some people but I would really like to have the option on how the thing behaves.
And frankly I liked having the Tabs on top not down the left side like it is now.
Ok enough for todays bitch session, back to your regularly scheduled programming.
I used to use iGoogle for my daily bits of news a while ago for some time. As you said, it sucks nuw but in fact, it already sucked back in these days. Luckily, there is some quite nice alternatives around, one of which I use now and it is just great. Maybe you'll want give it a try.. www.netvibes.com
Cheers, Thomas
I mean, how stupid is it to take up so much real estate with a big wide margin on the left of the page? I thought Google were smarter than that.
Try www.google.co.uk/ig
Generally speaking, the widgets have a lot more real estate to work with in the home page since they can be expanded to use the entire space. A lot of the benefits have not been realized by many of the user created widgets, but that will come with time.
I think the change in layout was done for two reasons, 1) the tabs along the top did not provide for a way to select a single widget. In order to do that, they would have had to turn them into some sort of menu. I don't know if that would have been better or not. There may have been technical reasons for not implementing that, and 2) More and more monitors are using the wide-screen height to width ratio, so I guess they figured they would have more space to work with.
Originally, they planned to have a chat box on the home page as well, but they had some trouble with it during development. The worst was that you would send a login/logout everytime you visited or left the page which drove your contacts nuts. That may have been one reason why they tried to make more of the widgets run within the single page.
Another thing that has been made possible with the new format is that the widget designers (and google of course) can now monetize their work with google ads in the full canvas mode. That may have been the primary driver for the change in my opinion.
Don't expect the other languages to remain in the old format for long. Google plans on making those change as well.
There are also plans to do a lot more in the way of social networking on ig as well. I'm guessing we'll see some interesting new widgets in there soon. If they can come up with a way for the widgets to talk to each other, we might see some things that haven't been possible before.
In addition to the email widget, I think the google news reader is MUCH better than the old one. You don't have to go to the actual application at all unless you need to make subscription changes.
While it seems a little awkward at first, I've grown to like it better than the old one. Of course if it really bothers you, at least there are alternatives out there.
oh, no. That's NOT how it worked. The old way if you clicked on the message, it took you to the full gmail - yes, with that particular message opened, but the full gmail. Now it takes you to a watered-down gmail - no colored labels, no ability to forward, add attachments to replies, etc. It's a total useless wasted annoying step.
I mean, what the hell are they thinking? What - "For your convenience and to give you an even better experience - we've removed all of your favorite features and functionality!"
I could MAYBE get used to the wasted space, I could MAYBE get used to the less visually friendly layout... but take away the features I rely on? I'm gone.
And for what? This is for what - so developers can have more space to use and to allow them to ADVERTISE. So in the past you used to have the dreary experience of having all your feeds and daily info easily accessible... but now you get the joy of having flash-intensive Tetris games with banner advertising!
I mean, who seriously uses gizmos? Widgets? They were fun for a second, but I quickly uninstalled Tetris and the daily cat photo and all the other stupid fluff, and just elft it at weather, email and RSS feeds.
The whole redesign is to be more like Facebook. But if I want Facebook I'll use Facebook. If I wanted to have big flash games and colorful avatars telling which of my friends are online and which are at Starbucks and inviting me to play Scrabble, I'd go to myspace or Facebook...NOT have that crap on my home page.
Don't hold back Jafafa let it all out ;).
BTW I completely agree, I guess if enough people complain we may get the feature to have a "classic igoogle" mode.