

Try Blogger's New Interface - sahaj
http://draft.blogger.com

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farlington
Beautiful _and_ 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.

~~~
bobo888
Am I the only one who thinks that the new design colours are somewhat
bleached? I would like more contrast.

I also find the "Reading List" from my Blogger account homepage to be useless.
If I want to subscribe to a feed, Google Reader is a much better option.

~~~
coliveira
I agree with you on the colors. No contrast, it makes it very hard to locate
what you need.

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timdorr
It _looks_ nice, but it doesn't feel quite right.

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.

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.

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.

Pretty attractive update, but fairly bad functionality and usability.

~~~
thomaslangston
The huge highlighted button seems to be a common usability issue with many of
Google's new designs. They seem to confuse "new user" with "regular user".

Case in point being the new groups design. Huge buttons to create a new group,
an action that happens very infrequently for me. Plus a huge splash screen
with product information (similar to the Blogger blog in the reading list)
which as a regular user, I just don't care.

~~~
ugh
It’s the page you go to to create new blogs. It is supposed to have a button
like that. The most important button on the respective pages looks like that.
On that particular page it’s most certainly the button to create a new blog.

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carterschonwald
This is nice! It also fits the pending revisions of blogger etc to unify the
google ui styles etc.

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!)

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benwerd
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?

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.

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.

~~~
travem
Actually what I'd expect from Microsoft is to delay launching the new thing
for several years in order to integrate it with various other services, re-
branding it to windows/live/.net XXX, and wondering why the world has moved on
in the meantime

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fribblerz
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 .

~~~
CrazedGeek
The killer for me is this:
<http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lo0ebqK4bl1qzasmo.png>

On Google Music, the actual music has good padding, but the rest of the page
has so much crap I can barely see any songs. And that's on a 1366*768 display,
so I'm a bit miffed.

~~~
fribblerz
An option to select from 2 settings would be better , like Gmail's new themes
- dense/regular , although dense is still too spaced when compared to the
default theme at the moment .

~~~
clobber
I'm worried we'll lose the look and feel of the old themes once the new Gmail
interface is rolled out. I dislike the Big Blue Button that is showing up in
all of Google's UI refreshes too. Google's search results seem very cluttered
as well.

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forgotusername
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.

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.

~~~
nametoremember
Have you nicknamed the Google bar as the "funeral bar" because it's dark? Are
all dark things funeral things?

~~~
iaskwhy
Never thought about it that way but it does start with a cross and my first
name, kinda fits the nickname.

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plusbryan
Nice to see Blogger getting some love. They seemed pretty stagnant for awhile.

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timmaah
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.

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/fresh-new-
perspective...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/fresh-new-perspectives-
for-your-blog.html)

~~~
dchest
They are not really templates, but separate views. If you append
"/view/<template_name>" to any blog URL on BlogSpot, you get this view.
Example: <http://googleblog.blogspot.com/view/flipcard>

~~~
timmaah
_Today we’re previewing five new dynamic templates in Blogger that you’ll soon
be able to customize and use for your blog._

Looks like the /view is just to preview them

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jannes
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:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhFc6GqVdU#t=97s>

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.

It's also interesting to see how the design has evolved from what they showed
in March to what they finally arrived at.

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Vivtek
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 _my_
content, I just want to see _my_ content. Maybe the page layout of the
dashboard is configurable, but ... I dunno. It's just too in-your-face.

Otherwise, though, I like it.

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coliveira
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.

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swanson
Anyone mind posting a screenshot? I'd like to see the UI but I don't want to
create a blog on Blogger just to see it.

~~~
thomaslangston
<http://i.imgur.com/5eSmA.png>

Email redacted in the top right. Four blog titles (sites, not posts) redacted
down the left.

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johnx123-up
Glad that now draft.blogger.com and blogger.com are integrated together with
nifty UI.

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pfui
Any hope they might actually revive Google Reader as part of this redesign
frenzy?

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CoryMathews
They are doing browser detection instead of feature detection.

"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."

~~~
kmfrk
It basically looks the same in Opera. (Unfortunately, I'm tempted to say.)

