Beautiful <i>and</i> functional. There are things to nitpick of course, but this is light years ahead of the old blogger. It's nice to see Google making a concerted effort to elevate the design of products across their portfolio. I used to think that visual design wasn't much of an institutional priority for G, but they've proven that wrong.
It <i>looks</i> nice, but it doesn't feel quite right.<p>Too much functionality depends on iconography, which leaves me having to map pictograms to actual words. It's OK for me to read some words. You're going to have to translate the interface anyways.<p>And there's very little use of contrast or color to help determine what is going on. My blogs and the reading list don't have a lot to differentiate each other, so I was initially confused where I would even go to post to my blog.<p>Also, the "New Blog" button is confusing. Are people really creating that many new blogs that they need a huge, highlighted button for it? I thought it was to make a new post (using "blog" as a verb, really), so I was confused when I click it and got something else.<p>Pretty attractive update, but fairly bad functionality and usability.
This is nice! It also fits the pending revisions of blogger etc to unify the google ui styles etc.<p>one thing I recently discovered about blogger that won me over is this: you can have you default draft template include the right commands to import the mathjax javascript into every post, so I can then just write inline and display math latex naively with \[ some math \] and \( math \) and it'll just work! (both in preview of post, and the live post!)
Inexplicable. I'm pretty sure Google just released some kind of new social product (although I've been having trouble finding links around here). The word on the street is also that Google has some kind of reader app (the name escapes me). These two things are what this Blogger interface does, so why on earth aren't they integrated?<p>Instead, they've taken a similar starting point (lightweight, white-heavy design that runs using Javascript and back-end data) and created something lifeless and disconnected from everything else.<p>This is Big Company Syndrome at work; exactly the kind of thing that you'd expect from a company like Microsoft, rather than the company that just released the best web app in years.
All the design changes since the launch of G+ could use some decrease in padding imo .
In netbooks the real content will start halfway across the screen - lot of unnecessary scrolling, looks good though .
It's pretty, but I'm left wondering why they bothered to launch it without the Google+ "funeral bar" integrated, or whatever you want to call it.<p>I find these UI refreshes an irksome feature of web software. They tend to appear on a day and time when you're most stressed, horking their newfangled wares with pop-ups that only do harm to the software's usability. Recent examples: the new Facebook chat sidebar abomination, the new Gmail people sidebar.
What happened to the new templates they announced at the end of March? I liked the look and was hoping to try one out for a personal project.<p><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/fresh-new-perspectives-for-your-blog.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/fresh-new-perspective...</a>
It seems that they have been working on this for a long time, as you can see in this video that they've put up in March:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhFc6GqVdU#t=97s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhFc6GqVdU#t=97s</a><p>I think it's really interesting to see what huge amounts of time goes into these redesigns at a company like Google. It's very different from what I do.<p>It's also interesting to see how the design has evolved from what they showed in March to what they finally arrived at.
The only real problem I see with this interface is that my own dashboard pages now display content from Google that I don't care about. When I'm doing <i>my</i> content, I just want to see <i>my</i> content. Maybe the page layout of the dashboard is configurable, but ... I dunno. It's just too in-your-face.<p>Otherwise, though, I like it.
This looks terrible in terms of usability. Everything is so white, there is no contrast at all. I find it really hard to see the difference between elements, and the "highlight" is barely visible. I guess one can get used to it, but would be much better with at least some contrast.
They are doing browser detection instead of feature detection.<p>"ERROR: Possible problem with your *.gwt.xml module file.
The compile time user.agent value (opera) does not match the runtime user.agent value (unknown). Expect more errors."