A month into Google’s experiment with the design of Gmail, we are safely past the reactionary phase of criticism. Now, we’re on to the searing and increasing hatred phase. It feels like Steve Jobs’ evil ghost doppelganger went through the interface and made everything just a little bit harder to use. The problems with the new Gmail are not about look and feel; they strike right at the core usability of the software. This is the biggest step back for email since I signed up for Gmail in 2004.

Madrigal’s biggest beef involves what looks like ill-advised changes to the integration of chat with e-mail. I almost never use Gmail for instant messaging, which may explain why I like the very same upgrade that’s driving him bonkers.

My biggest disappointment: The app doesn’t support multiple accounts. If you have two Google accounts–one for work, one for personal use–you know that any solution that supports both of them is instantly more useful than any one that doesn’t. I’ve been using a $1.99 third-party app called G-Whizz Google Apps Browser to traverse almost instantly between both of my accounts. Looks like I’ll still need it…

Here’s Google’s video about the new version:

Google says it’ll be adding a “Switch to the new look” link to Gmail’s lower right-hand corner over the next few days.

Back in February of 2010, Google announced that it was giving up on Google Gears, its neat-but-ultimately-unsatisfying technology that helped make Web services work even when the Web wasn’t available. The company said that it made more sense to concentrate on using HTML5 technologies to build offline capabilities into its Web apps. And now it’s done so, with offline-capable versions of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs.

In no case is Google delivering a full-blown version of the service in question that requires no Internet connection. It’s released a Chrome Web App for offline Gmail that also adds some offline features to Calendar and Docs. And the great news, as far as I’m concerned, is that the offline Gmail app is basically the tablet version of Gmail. Compared to full-blown Gmail, it’s stripped down–but it’s so nicely done that I prefer it to its fancier cousin, at least for simple e-mail triage. In fact, I spent a lot of time trying to make tablet Gmail work in a Mac browser, then gave up and started running Apple’s iOS simulator to do the job. From now on, I have to do is run the Chrome app.

I might be missing something, but I think that this version of Gmail doesn’t support keyboard shortcuts; if not, I hope Google is working on adding them back in. [UPDATE: It has support for basic shortcuts, but not the one I tried.]

The offline features for Calendar and Docs are limited: you can view calendar items and RSVP to them, and view documents and spreadsheets. Google says it’s working to add more capabilities, such as editing, and hopes to bring offline capabilities to browsers other than its own.

The single biggest questions about Google’s Chromebooks has always been “What do I do when I can’t get online?” These new offline features don’t render the issue moot, but they’re a step in the right direction. And me, I plan to run the new Gmail app even when I have all the Internet connectivity I could ever want…

Incidentally, I’m not sure why this feature is usually called a “preview pane”–when you have the pane open, you can reply, forward, and otherwise do all the things you’d do with the message in question. It’s not previewing the message so much as squeezing it onto the same page as the inbox.

Google’s implementation is nicely done: you can put the message pane to the right of the inbox or below it, or toggle it off altogether. The only issue I’ve found is that Rapportive, a cool Gmail plug-in that shows you information about your correspondents, doesn’t seem to work with the pane. I suspect that the Rapportive folks will fix this soon enough. And I like the pane so much I’ll cheerfully live without Rapportive for the time being.

What you like

• The clean and minimalist look of the new design
• Seeing a consistent “look” across Google products

“The new Preview theme is wonderful! It’s clean and crisp, easy to read and really focused on the one thing that matters most in Gmail — the mail! Thanks!”

What you want to change

• Too much whitespace and not enough information (though interestingly, many people reported that they appreciated to lower information density after a while)
• Not enough contrast
• Darker theme options

Fine by me if there’s a dense version and a lighter, airier one. (There already is–the new theme is available in two variants.) But for purely selfish reasons, I hope that Google doesn’t react to the “Too much whitespace” feedback by cramming more stuff back onto the page. My eyeballs are very happy with the new look just the way it is.

But my favorite Google news of the week is an item that doesn’t sound all that explosive: it released a couple of new themes for Gmail. I’m using one of them now. All it does is to give Gmail a bit of the new look that’s also visible in Google+ and the revised home page. And that turns out to be a big deal.

I’ve written–probably too often–about my love/hate relationship with Gmail. The hate part mostly relates to the interface, which has long been so crowded with stuff–both important and annoying irrelevant–that using the service sometimes feels like reading a Where’s Waldo book.

The new themes only do so much. They don’t strip out the feature overload, or even more items around much. (They do, however, move the horizontal text ad from the top to the bottom.) Other than tweaks to the color scheme, the main thing that’s new is more white space. A lot of it–on my MacBook Air, I can see fourteen items in the inbox without scrolling, vs. 25 lines using the default look.

Here’s Google’s sample screenshot:

It makes a huge difference in readability and the ability to find items without any hide-and-seek. I can feel my eyeballs smiling every time I use it.

Anyone who’s ever worked at a magazine knows that white space makes things far more legible. (Or at least should: I  don’t know how many hours of my life as a magazine editor I spent listening to art people advocating for more white space, and writers arguing for more text.) Google surely knows that white space is important–its iconic home page is iconic in part because the company wisely chose to devote almost all of it to unoccupied space.

Google’s blog post on the themes says that “The changes are not going to happen all at once” and that they will “strip out unnecessary clutter.” I take that as meaning that the makeover won’t just be cosmetic–it will also involve reducing the sheer volume of fripperies that Gmail involves, or at least allowing us to turn them on and off. I can’t wait.