Zentrope

google theme

I really don’t like the new google themes on their various apps because they take up too much room. With Reader and Groups, the content I actually want to see consists of about 25% of the screen in the lower, right-hand part of my browser.

Reader is a giant list of articles. Let me see the giant list. I don’t need to see controls and search widgets surrounded my massive amounts of white space and all that stuff. Maybe sometimes, but almost never. At least with reader, you can get rid of the side bar.

Groups is even worse. Can’t get rid of the side bar. Can’t change the font size (which matters to me depending on if I’m reading via laptop or big-ass screen, or fresh in the morning, or burnt-out at night, or need to keep the text small so I can follow instructions in some other app, or large so I can browse comfortably from a distance while sipping coffee).

Argh!

My plans are this:

• Get rid of gmail (done, replaced with hosted IMAP).
• Use a desktop/ios feed reader (done, using Reeder).
• Advocate that my feed reader stops syncing with google (planned, Reeder dev agrees).
• Get the groups mail I like emailed to me, at least for the low-flow groups (ongoing).

I guess I’ll just have to suffer reading Google Groups for high volume lists until someone makes a desktop client for it, or Google tunes its theme.

If there’s one thing Microsoft and Google should learn from Apple, it’s that they should minimize the self-promoting chrome around their applications and let people focus on the actual content.

Update: You can hit the “f” key in both Groups and Reader to remove a lot of the chrome. I can quibble on how discoverable that option is, but at least it’s there!