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How Google created a custom Material theme
- qubex 8y agoThis might be vaguely off-topic but sometimes I feel like the only person on Earth that has absolutely no interest in webmail generally and gmail in particular. Sure, I have an account dating back to the very early era when it was invitation-only (May 2004 or thereabouts) but I’ve never really used it. Plugins and multiple redesigns have totally passed me by. All I do is keep it linked to my various versions of Mail.app running on my Macs and iDevices as a kind of ”Email Provider Of Last Resort”. In general, what is the appeal of having two web-applications with their double layer of inconsistent interfaces (web-app’s and browser’s)? That feels more like confusion to me than it does universality. Tabs to recreate a lesser incarnation of multitasking in the browser totally at odds with the multi-windowed manner in which most OS’ GUIs present it multiple applications onscreen simultaneously. It is all so deeply wrong to me. You have things you consider ’apps’ in a browser but they’re actually thickish clients to cloud-based services; a single browser window has a bunch of them running in tabs that obscure one-another, you switch (with a convenient hot-key combo) into another application running on your desktop as a local process, then you have to go back to the browser to another webapp, so you hot key back to the browser, and then have to hunt through the tabs, losing what you had onscreen to begin with. Seriously, folks, it’s ludicrous.