Thursday, May 13, 2004
New Blogger - a critical review
* edit posts screen no longer gives a feel for what the blog looks like - you now need to hit view blog, which opens a new window, which then needs closing... it looks like the tab should use the same screen, but it doesn't... is this because of external publishing? or my IE settings? either way it's a pain
* the editing page now uses more of the screen, which is more "in yer face", with no real gains. having to switch between different screens to edit posts, view posts, view blog is additional workload.
* post by email might be useful, haven't used it yet
* still no search!
* and still no easy way to reference other posts, as writing the above link just showed me
* the edit posts screen now makes posts look like emails - I'm not sure about this change in metaphor. it's nice to be able to glance and see drafts, see what needs editing etc, and you can expand individual posts. but to edit, need to open to new screen, losing the context of where the current post is. edit in this list would be much better
in summary, there are some improvements in here, but I think overall I preferred the old design, and many of the tweaks actually make it harder to manage a blog that has more than one person posting to it, like this one. the whole thing seems a bit flakey, sometimes not loading pages, failing to publish, and even crashing my browser. and I still can't believe there's no search!
Revised - 14th May - Russell writes: it's infuriating - it's gone to a more cartoon style, it assumes you want to publish most things straight away, which is a pain when you are editing a few bits at once and would rather publish the whole set of changes at the end - but the one time you probably do want immediate publication, when you've written a new post, it defaults to saving it as a draft and not publishing it. Where's your HCI, guys?
* edit posts screen no longer gives a feel for what the blog looks like - you now need to hit view blog, which opens a new window, which then needs closing... it looks like the tab should use the same screen, but it doesn't... is this because of external publishing? or my IE settings? either way it's a pain
* the editing page now uses more of the screen, which is more "in yer face", with no real gains. having to switch between different screens to edit posts, view posts, view blog is additional workload.
* post by email might be useful, haven't used it yet
* still no search!
* and still no easy way to reference other posts, as writing the above link just showed me
* the edit posts screen now makes posts look like emails - I'm not sure about this change in metaphor. it's nice to be able to glance and see drafts, see what needs editing etc, and you can expand individual posts. but to edit, need to open to new screen, losing the context of where the current post is. edit in this list would be much better
in summary, there are some improvements in here, but I think overall I preferred the old design, and many of the tweaks actually make it harder to manage a blog that has more than one person posting to it, like this one. the whole thing seems a bit flakey, sometimes not loading pages, failing to publish, and even crashing my browser. and I still can't believe there's no search!
Revised - 14th May - Russell writes: it's infuriating - it's gone to a more cartoon style, it assumes you want to publish most things straight away, which is a pain when you are editing a few bits at once and would rather publish the whole set of changes at the end - but the one time you probably do want immediate publication, when you've written a new post, it defaults to saving it as a draft and not publishing it. Where's your HCI, guys?
Comments:
Post a Comment
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
Atom
RSS