cranky pixels

I signed up to beta test the new Yahoo! mail. Apparently the word “beta” is like crack to me. I had no problem with the old Yahoo! mail, aside from the fact that it was ugly and clunky and, you know, not in beta.

Staying in-touch is faster and simpler with the Yahoo! Mail Beta.

It took a long time for the new interface to load (which originally I attributed to newness, although it’s happened every time since). And then it took a long time for my messages to load. I’m not sure why they used the word “faster,” since that is clearly a lie. Perhaps by “faster” they meant “prettier.” It certainly is pretty. Even the ads that threaten to overpower the message viewing area seem more attractive than before.

It still does the thing I hate most about Yahoo! Mail, which you can see on the screenshot: the landing page. I click “My Mail,” and what do I see? A greeting (“Welcome, Jessica!”) and a note telling me how many messages I have. You know what? I could probably figure out how many messages I have by looking at them. I don’t need advance warning. It’s only one click, but that extra click causes me no end of annoyance.

Once I’ve gotten to my messages, the interface is much more like a desktop e-mail client than it was before. There’s a preview screen below the message list, just like in Mail. It does speed up the process of determining which messages are spam – no longer do I have to wait for the message to open in order to see if it’s something I want to keep. The folders are all listed in the sidebar, as are links to the calendar, notepad, and RSS feeds. People who use Yahoo as their primary portal will appreciate the integration.

All in all, the new interface seems much more modern and slick than the old one. If Yahoo! would get rid of the landing screen and find a way to decrease loading time, I might be persuaded to love my Yahoo! mail account the way I love my dot mac account.

technorati tags:yahoo mail, beta

Blogged with Flock

I just found out that the coComment plugin works with Flock. This kicks all kinds of ass, especially since I just installed the new Firefox beta (I’m a sucker for a beta) as my “other” browser and discovered that the coComment plugin wouldn’t work on it. Because it technically doesn’t exist yet. (It’s really cool, though. Has a lot more in common with Flock now, actually. Heh.)

I’m loving the Flock thing, in case you can’t tell. It occurred to me today actually that Not So might want to download Flock for the Flickr uploading alone. His Windows uploader is pretty sparse. (I wonder if there’s a Firefox/Flickr plugin. I should check. Because I am like that.)

Oh, and I just posted a personal portfolio site on our neumanbeck server – it might still be wonky, so any feedback is appreciated. Hint, hint.

technorati tags:flock, flickr, portfolio

Blogged with Flock

The verdict is in.

…sigh.

I wanted to like Dailymotion. In fact, I do like Dailymotion. They’re based in France and have all sorts of international users – the TV commercials alone are enough to make me fall deeply and unreservedly in love, and posting to a blog couldn’t be simpler – two clicks and you’re there. The only problem (as you can see from this post) is that the video is weirdly resized in the viewer window. I tried uploading a different video and it did the same thing.

VideoEgg looks really, really cool, but it doesn’t want to play with my Panther OS iBook. I might be able to get it working with the iMac, but that’ll need to wait until I get the office set up, and where’s the instant gratification in that? Also, it doesn’t integrate directly with WordPress. Which is fine, but doesn’t give me any particular impetus to make it work, you know? I may test it out once the iMac’s up and running again, seeing as all the videos will be stored on that hard drive anyway. Or at least I think they will. Moving on.

On a whim, I tried out Google’s video service, and behold: we have video. It’s fast, it’s sized correctly, and it posted in my blog with no problems. (Google, like VideoEgg, doesn’t offer a direct post to WordPress, but they don’t directly post to anything so I guess that’s okay.)

My choice?

Google Video is the clear winner. All hail Google.

technorati tags:google, video, dailymotion, videoegg, wordpress

Blogged with Flock