pne | Argh, new Fastmail interface! (Reply)

So this night they had some (announced) downtime over at Fastmail.FM, which I thought nothing of as I wouldn’t be awake at 4 o’clock my time.

But this morning I was greeted to an announcement telling me the URL I was using for my Inbox was old and to please go through the Login screen again. OK, fine, whatever.

But aaah! Everything looks so different!

My two biggest gripes are that unread and read messages are not clearly distinguished and that the keyboard shortcuts no longer seem to work.

Previously, unread messages had a short preview and read ones had a darker background and no preview. Now, all messages have a preview and the background on read ones is so light as to be nearly the same as the white behind the unread ones. Sure, unread messages have the subject in bold, but the difference is not as noticeable as it used to be.

(And they seem to have instituted infinite scrolling with delayed loading-on-demand. So you can’t page back to somewhere. Yech.)

And I was a little miffed when Fastmail last changed their keyboard navigation, but I adjusted; but now things don’t work and I don’t see any obvious way to bring up the old action menu which used to pop up when you hit ".". (".dp" was built into muscle memory for "delete message and go to previous".)

And their announcement says for those two points: "Unfortunately you can’t show a preview for only unread emails, it’s either all or none with the new interface." and "We have not yet updated our help documentation; we are currently working on that and hope to have it done soon. We do not believe this is a major impediment to users using the new interface as most of the features are highly discoverable as needed."

Thanks, guys.

(Also, what's with the preview being all-or-nothing? Is this something that's so difficult to program? Or is this one of the dumbing-down things: "mustn't confuse the poor widdle users' heads with an additional option"?)

Methinks I'll be taking advantage of my paid status and sending off a support request about the keyboard navigation thing.