This post is a rant, albeit a fairly short one. Feel free to skip it
and come back tomorrow.
I use gmail and anyone who also uses gmail will surely sympathise. I
know that Google's upgrades always seem to make things worse but the
recent mandatory "upgrades" to gmail are on a whole new level of
bizarre unusability.
First of all I was forced to switch from an interface that I was
perfectly happy with.
Then there was the bug that meant that while ALL of the text
descriptions of the buttons had gone the new icons didn't show so
every button showed as a blank square over which I needed to hover to
find out what it did.
With that fixed, at least to the extent where I have icons rather then
my preferred text, the true genius of the upgrade became apparent.
Trying to forward an email I tried to find the way to get my list of
addresses to choose from. After fifteen fruitless minutes of
searching, someone helped me find it but then I could only create a
new email rather than put in the forwarding addresses for the required
people. I had to cut and paste every individual address to do it.
Still, clumsy and awkward but doable.
Gets better though.
Having done that I decided to reply in the thread to the original
post, composed my reply and sent it.
Where did it go?
Well it wasn't to the original sender.
It was to the people I had forwarded the post to. It seems that I need
to open the specific post within the thread and reply to that rather
than to the thread itself.
Google, you have outdone yourselves. The new interface is the most
counter-intuitive, user-unfriendly piece of software I have seen in
many a long year. And I worked in IT for twenty years and thought I'd
seen it all.
I am seriously considering switching back to Hotmail which I left years ago.
Nice job!
