Earlier this week, when checking my email, I noticed that our friends over at Google had made a couple changes to the buttons above the inbox.

For reference, this is what the buttons looked like before the change (and without my custom theme):

The first change, adding the Move To and Labels controls, are welcome changes.  The other change, redesigning and removing the spacing between the buttons, not so much.  The reason for placing the buttons flush against one another is likely the result of, after having added more buttons, deciding that this increased quantity of buttons warrants the need for grouping them.  While that’s all good and well, the decision to actually have the buttons completely flush against one another was a bad decision indeed.  Unwittingly, the geniuses at Google have not so much created a group of buttons but really instead created what visually is–particularly for the rapidly scanning and hunting Steve Krug archetypal web user–one big honking button.  This means that every time I want to take the very very common action of deleting something, I can’t just target the delete button, I have to scan the Gigantor-button to find the part within it that contains the delete section. And after having used this redesigned version for a few days now, I am still finding myself scanning for the delete portion.

This type of UI flubber, a bad design choice that on one hand really only leads to a fraction of a second’s delay, is what I call a micro-annoyance.  Now, let’s say this micro-annoyance appeared on some registration form.  That wouldn’t really matter too much since I would only have to deal with it once.  But when it appears on something that I use every day, all day, all the time, that changes everything.  Suddenly it is significant.

What’s truly annoying, though, is how easy it would be to fix this issue.  Just add a couple pixels of spacing between each of the buttons.  Something like this:

You basically get the best of both worlds – you keep your button grouping, while also removing the micro annoyance of making me scan for the Delete button every time.

Was checking out the Google 10th Birthday site, which is kind of cool, in a Trivial Pursuit kind of way, but then came across something even cooler – the Google 10 to the 100th project, which essentially is a contest for who can propose the best idea that will help the most people. On the main page, they have this zany little video, which I find equally cute, informative, and vaguely annoying:

Try to ignore the cutesy animated characters over the alternarock soundtrack and submit your idea today!

When you first encounter something that has been designed just right – the iPhone, Gmail, the Swedish cheese knife and now Google Chrome, you always find yourself wondering what you were thinking using all those other crappy products (I can’t imagine, for example, going back to a regular cell phone, or using an old-skool email client.) And now, after having only played around with Google’s new and long-awaited browser, I knew immediately that it was a keeper. And it’s not just because of all the widely discussed features like separate processes for each tab, and an overall much more modern system architecture. Maybe what I love most is what is not there, which is very much in line with that greatest of design maxims:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Chrome certainly makes that idea manifest. And sure, maybe somethings were taken away that I’d want, like the ability to have a color theme different from the a-bit-too-dark Bloogle blue, or access to all my favorite FireFox add-ons. Oh, and somewhat ironically, I do miss my Google toolbar, particularly the autofill feature. But I expect that will all come in time.

On the lighter side, I just love how Microsoft came out with a statement today saying they weren’t worried about Chrome competing with IE8 – the only thing preventing that from happening is the default install base on Windows PCs – if IE weren’t installed by default on so many machines, their market share would fade away so fast – IE feels like an old jalopy compared to FireFox, and I hate to say this, but FireFox, while still an amazing browser, just feels slow and tired compared to Chrome (though maybe I should give it some time and open up a gazillion tabs and get umpteen applications running and see if Chrome’s garbage collection really is as great as they sat it is) – and one reason it hurts to say that is because so much of what makes Chrome great is thanks to the sweat and hard work and dedication of the people over at Mozilla – Google even made of point saying so in their super cool comic strip about the new browser. I love how they call it a ‘book’ – hey Googlers, did you know that there also are these books out there with, like, text and stuff :)

Over the weekend, I think, Google updated their favicon (or shortcut icon) …

First off, I was pretty confused when I saw this, since seeing that g out of context doesn’t remind me at all of the Google brand. The old favicon was much better:

While that lowercase g could be pretty much anything, it’s hard to confuse this with anything other than Google. But worse, and this was the case with their previous favicons as well, they have the same favicon for several different services, such as search, maps, and news.  So why is this a big deal (or a small-big deal)?  Well, I use favicons as buttons in my bookmarks toolbar…

This is a great way to conserve space.  The only requirement is that the people who are designing the website are thinking about how favicons might be used.  (Ok, in addition to the requirement of having a favicon in the first place.) Maybe what I’m doing is a bit unusual – basically turning favicons into buttons by removing the text description, but it seems to make sense, no?  So, if you happen to be someone who designs favicons or has any say about it, if you’re working on a suite of services, don’t use the same favicon for all of them.  Even if users aren’t being nerdy like me, it still makes it easier to target the right app if it has distinct visual mark or brand.

JotSpot used to be my favorite Wiki tool and I was so sad to see it vanish after being acquired by Google. Today, at long last, JotSpot is back in the form of Google Sites. Weirdly, the only way you can sign up to use it (for now), is if you have a Google Apps account – which I think is something primarily used by small businesses. Not sure why Google would assume that individuals would not be just as interested in this tool – for the same reason that BaseCamp is used both by teams and individuals. Well, no matter, I happen to have a Google Apps account and started playing around with the app – and I have to say, I wasn’t very impressed. Sure, it’s still in ‘Beta’ – but Google has sort of shot themselves in the foot with their liberal use of that term (with Gmail still in Beta, Google has basically rendered the term meaningless) – so because it’s meaningless, people ignore that supposed message that things may not be quite working as expected, and expect everything to work just right. The whole experience still feels a bit clunky, at least by Google standards – for example, I created a new page, assuming it would then show up in my list of pages in the sidebar – but for some mysterious reason, I have to go into the settings for that page and choose to have it display in my page list – makes no sense. Considering that this app is integrated with the apps suite, it’s also not clear to me what the relationship is between the various dashboards you can create as part of this app and the dashboard that is part of the Google Apps suite – to be clear, this is not the same as the iGoogle dashboard. In fact, it seems like Google in general is having a bit of an IA problem – lots of apps all sort of interconnected but no overall semblance of order.

Anyway, bottom line is that Google Sites will probably be a worthwhile Wiki, Team Tool, whatever, eventually, but for now, it’s still a bit rough around the edges.

So, not unexpectedly, the aging 800-pound gorilla Microsoft recently put in a bid to acquire a big box of Viagra aka Yahoo for 44 some billion dollars, hoping to stave off it’s losing battle against the young-buck 800 lb (8000 lb?) gorilla Google. Call me a pessimist, but even if this deal goes through, I don’t think it’s going to achieve what Microsoft appears to hope it will achieve. Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo have been leaders in innovation on the web. They’ve both been one step behind Google, mimicking whatever Google does, and rarely leading the way. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the web, for better or worse, would not be what it is today were it not for Google. The only way, then, that any kind of collaboration between Microsoft and Yahoo could be successful–be it the current potential acquisition or something else–it would need to fundamentally reshape the web. The point that I am meanderingly getting to here is that two 800-pound gorillas are not necessarily better than one. Sure, in the short term, they could launch some gigantor campaign with lots of cool free stuff and whiz-bang services or whatever, but ultimately, unless they are truly innovating, they’ll wither away. In fact, one of the main problems Microsoft already is struggling with is that it’s becoming so much of a dinosaur (man, I just seem to love those animal metaphors), that it’s too slow and too unwieldy to get anything done in any reasonable amount of time (one word: Vista) Adding to Microsoft’s bulk with another not-so-small company would not alleviate this (though Ballmer appears to think that acquiring Yahoo would allow eliminating redundancies between the organizations.) So, unless some magical synergy thing happens between the companies should the deal go through, I think it’s just going to be more of the same. That’s not so say that Google will continue to be the leader. In fact, while Microhoo are busy exchanging billions, there are probably a couple young geniuses sitting in some garage (why is it that all computer innovations have to happen in a garage?) developing an idea that will reshape the web as we know it and make this whole acquisition thing irrelevant.

After having just spent a few minutes playing around with Buzzword, a new WYSIWYG web-based document editor, it’s hard to return to Google Docs. I mean, it just feels so clunky compared to this elegantly designed editor. Sure, Google docs is a lot more than a WYSIWYG editor. But looking strictly at the editor features, Buzzword completely blows Google Docs out of the water. And it’s still only in preview. One reason for this is because the people at Virtual Ubiquity made what I think was a very smart decision and designed the app in Flash, which just makes it so much easier to add advanced functionality beyond the glorified Rich Text Area interface the Google Docs really is. Oh, by the way, I’m talking strictly about Docs here – the far more complex Google Spreadsheet remains a work of art.

There is something ironic in how, while Apple’s trademark tagline is “think different,” the ones who really are thinking different when it comes to phones (and a lot of other stuff – don’t they have a search engine?) is Google. Yes, yes, Apple’s iPhone is an absolutely brilliant work of function meeting form, and had it not been for the fact that Google’s (non-) phone has been on the horizon ever since the iPhone was released, I would probably have picked one up. But the fact of the matter is that, design brilliance notwithstanding, the iPhone is still just a better mouse trap. (Ok, a cooler, hipper, insanely great mouse trap.) Worse, just like all the other phones out there, it’s a locked down, proprietary, dont-even-think-about-installing-whatever-you-want mouse trap. And that is where Google, or Andy Rubin, who is heading up the GPhone effort, is rethinking the fundamental phone paradigm, as Andy Rubin explains in an article on the Gphone in the New York Times:

We are not building a GPhone; we are enabling 1,000 people to build a GPhone.

In some ways, all Rubin is doing is carrying over a fundamental idea behind Web 2.0 into the mobile domain: openness, specifically open-sourcing, as fuel for innovation. While Nokia and Blackberry and Motorola (and now Apple) are butting heads, reinventing one another’s wheels (how’s that for some seriously mixed metaphors), Google is taking the same approach to phones as they have taken to the web, which, last time I checked, seemed to have worked out pretty well. In other words, they are making all their mobile software freely available to several major manufacturers by way of the Open Handset Alliance, which currently has 30 some major phone manufacturers as members.

For me, what is most attractive about this model is that, if I so wish, I’ll be able to install software such as Skype, on the phone. In other words, I’ll be able to install free-calling software where it belongs, on a phone, not on my laptop (which was never designed to be a phone.) The reason Google has no problem with this is because their income model is not about charging me for my calls, it’s about ad revenue, which I have no problem with. Of course, someone who will likely have a definite problem with that is AT&T and Verizon, which explains why they so far have taken the Luddite stance (or should I say deer-caught-in-the-google-headlights stance?) of not wanting to join this effort.

Or maybe what they’re really scared of are the GPhone’s team of (very young) designers ;)

Is there a better way to think outside the box (er, phone?) than to ask a bunch of kids what a magic phone would be able to do?

I think it’s been a couple days now since Gmail was updated to a new version (apparently only for some users, but for whatever reason I was one of them.) It seems to still be a bit buggy. For example, when I click on the Contacts link, I sometimes get the following blank box.

This only happens sporadically. When it works right, I get the new Gmail contacts interface

The “most contacted” feature is all good and well, but my favorite feature is the groups feature. No more cobbling together the same list of people to send messages to. While it works great overall, again some bugs are apparently still being ironed out, such as the inline Add New… group option

This seems to still be buggy (had to first go and use the add new group and then I could use the add to group option), but that’s all water under the bridge, as I’m sure this will be fixed soon.

Oh, and the other great improvement, which probably tops all the visible features – Google apparently recoded the front-end of the app, cleaning up what likely must have been iteration after iteration of Javascript for each new feature added over the months and years – the result is incredible. I remember being impressed with how zippy Gmail was when it first was released, and I guess I hadn’t noticed that it gradually had become pretty sluggish over time – no more.

So I guess the only question that remains is: how many more updates does Google need to do before the thing no longer is in Beta?

So I’m sitting here tooling around with the new features of the Google personalized homepage (last time I visited, they did not have the tab feature, for example), and finding myself not at all thinking about Google; I’m thinking about Microsoft, more specifically their forthcoming operating system, which legend has it is to be released sometime in 2007. Every time I turn around, I seem to be discovering and trying out some new feature or product released by Google, but with Microsoft, I mostly find myself reading about them, as in that it’s either been delayed, or that there is some security issue. On the one hand, I’m really comparing apples (eh, not to be confused with Apples) and oranges here – while Google is churning out one little app after another, what Microsoft is working on is the far more extensive effort of developing an operating system, of building the environment in which apps like Google’s can live. But at the same time, I have to wonder how all this would be different if the tables were turned…

Imagine for a moment that it is Google who is busy working on a new operating system while Microsoft is developing a bunch of tiny web-apps. (Btw, some of the apps Google is producing are quickly becoming less and less tiny, like the enterprise version of Gmail, which essentialy is a repackaged version of what they’ve been using internally – I am guessing we’ll be seeing more of their internal tools, such as their internal Help Desk system, also being made publicly available before too long.) My guess is that the process of implementing a Google OS would be approached very similarly to how Linux was created, with an initial seed kernel created by Linus Brin and Larry Torvalds (ha ha), followed by an open-sourcish approach, where the OS essentially is allowed to grow out in the open (as opposed to behind closed doors in Redmond) – a continaul flow of tiny improvements and design changes.

But that would only be the beginning of the differences. I can not imagine a Google OS that is not a fundamental departure from any of the major operating systems in use today. For starters, I would assume that the entire notion of a browser would vanish. In other words, once you boot up, if a network can be found, LAN, WAN, WiFi, whatever, you are online (OSX already does this to a degree.) In other words, it will be considered the default state of the operating system (akin to a UNIX terminal, which is never anything more than a network node), rather than a special state. Unfortunately, Microsoft Live notwithstanding, from my own tests of Vista, it seems that the new MS OS will continue to treat being on a network as a special state. No, I’m not talking about being on a local network (MS’s OS’s have handled that quite well since NT), I’m talking about full connectivity. So what’s the big deal about this distinction? Well, going back to what I mentioned earlier about the browser vanishing, what this means is that the operating system and what we currently think of as a standards-based browser would be completely fused. No more launching Firefox or whatever to get to Amazon or eBay or what-not. When the operating system boots up, you’d be greeted with, among other things, a big fat text field (yes, only one text field for URLs, searches, commands, everything – and I should actually credit my good friend Liz, for that idea), where you type in whatever it is you want to do or find or run or whatever. Of course, you wouldn’t want to have to type in things you do all the time, which brings us back to that personalized Google homepage. Functioning very similarly to a personalized homepage, the desktop keeps track of all your recent activities, your favorite locations, applications, etc. And better yet, as you work, all your data, and all your preferences would be stored in a central location, so that when you’re logging in to your computer, it really doesn’t matter what computer you’re logging in to – all your personalizations would be available to you as long as you are able to be online – and for those situations where you can’t get a connection, your personal machine would have lots and lots of storage, and automatically keep a synchronized local version of your data and preferences, doubling also as a continual backup system. But all these features would be emergent in a Google OS – in other words, they would not all be available right away, but would appear piecemeal, which brings us back to the core difference between the fundamental philosophies underlying how Google (and other Web 2.0 folk, like 37s or Flickr) approach design – rather than trying to get everything perfect before releasing something (which is what Microsoft is trying to do with Vista, and which we all know can never happen), the approach is to release something when it is good enough, when people can start to use it and react to it, and then keep adding to it. That’s the very evolutionary approach that I think Microsoft needs to turn to, or (and forgive me for sounding all doomsdayish here), Microsoft may not be releasing many more operating systems after Vista, because I think operating systems like we know them today will become virtually irrelevant before too long.