Some musings on the new blogger

I'm guessing that people who read this (does anyone read this?!) don't necessarily have blogger.  But it's recently changed it's interface and it's very...  White.  Uncluttered.  Minimalist.  And I'm not quite convinced I like it in terms of the whiteness and lack of anything to click on.  All the post settings are now at the side (which probably makes no sense, but basically the options where I choose things like labels aren't beneath the post any more).  And there's a huge bit underneath where I'm typing this that's completely unused.  Maybe it's so it can be used on a phone?  But what about us users who happen to have a rather large screen?

It looks a lot more like a text editor now than it did before.  Which I guess is nice in that it makes it a lot more obvious to use for new people.  And I never really used the HTML stuff anyway, so that's not a problem.  I believe there are now more fonts and colours and things, but as I've never had reason to use different fonts and colours and things and don't know that I necessarily ever will, that's not that exciting.  There are buttons to add videos.  Maybe one day I will add a video.

It's gone a lot more icon based, especially on the dashboard.  I wonder if one day historians will look at screen shots of old computer programmes and try to extrapolate symbolic meanings.  And will they compare the different symbols which do the same things?  I wonder what you could learn from, for example, comparing the things that office, google, mac and open office use for functions within their documents.  Probably nothing, to be honest.  Which won't stop somebody trying, I'm sure.

I'm also most impressed with the 'send feedback' thing.  I thought I'd mention the large empty space that could quite easily be used for something (what?  I don't know, I'm not a software designer.  Maybe just have the compose box take up the whole space to start with, instead of it jumping to the bigger size only when you reach the bottom.)  So there was this button to highlight things using click and drag, and then you type the problem into the text box that pops up in the bottom corner of the screen.  I wonder if there's some way of making this a bit more colourful.  I miss the colourfulness.

So there you go, a nice random post as I procrastinate doing anything particularly productive on the conversion of the English.  Maybe I'll tell you a bit about that topic in a future post, once I've got my head round (or got my head as far round as possible) what actually happened.  Or what probably happened.  It was a long time ago, and it seems nobody's entirely sure of the details.  But that ramble doesn't belong in this post...