Today the Yahoo! Mail Beta software is being opened up for general release (previously it had been in a limited beta). It’s still “beta” software, but I know they wanted to make sure it was reliable and scalable before opening up to the general user base. (Internally, we’ve been able to run it for about 6 months.) This release has been getting really good reviews. There’s a lot of AJAX magic going on that makes the UI look and act very similar to a desktop application. People used to running Outlook will probably like this interface as well. I like…
Had a pretty good time at Day 1 of the Future of Web Apps conference today. The presentations by Dick Hardt, Tom Coates, and Tantek Çelik were the best. The Yahoo! ZoneTag talk was pretty cool, but could have been shown better, maybe with an ELMO. The Google Calendar talk was pretty good, but the presentation ran a bit and didn’t do the product justice. Oh, and the WiFi was horrible, basically useless. I don’t think it’s the workshop organizers’ fault (they probably spent a bundle on it), but the WiFi provider seriously dropped the ball on this one. Literally…
I’ll be spending the next two days up in the City attending the Carson Workshops Summit on “The Future of Web Apps“. Yahoo! is a gold sponsor, so I’ll be helping represent the company (as best I can…), but mostly trying to learn from all the talks and other attendees. Should be fun!
This post from Creating Passionate Users is a couple weeks old, but really stuck with me: Why do so many companies treat potential users so much better than existing users? Think about it. The brochure is a thing of beauty, while the user manual is a thing of boredom. The brochure gets the big budget while the manual gets the big index. What if we stopped making the docs we give http://ugateamunited.com/online/lamisil/ away for free SO much nicer than the ones the user paid for? What if instead of seducing potential users to buy, we seduced existing users to learn?…
This week the hard drive on my Windows desktop at work bit the dust. I had most of it backed up, but still need to reinstall all the software and tweaks (yet again). To help me keep better track of this, here’s my definitive list of essential Firefox extensions…