New release coming to a browser near you
am 27.01.2007 22:16:30 von spamhotmailhttp://updates.mail.yahoo.com/blog/archives/35
New release coming to a browser near you
December 15, 2006 on 11:43 am
Back in the day I used to post changelogs for Yahoo! Mail Beta on my
personal blog. So many people turned to my blog for updates that
people within the company took notice. That's really how I got my
start doing this evangelism gig. So, what better to post now than
another changelog? However, unlike my past changelogs, this won't just
be a simple bullet list. I'm going to get into some of the more
interesting items in the release one by one.
We're just starting to roll out this new release. As always, we'll be
upgrading systems over a period of time, so if you don't get the
update right away, please be patient.
Performance Updates
We hear complaints about the speed of the beta from time to time.
Fortunately we have some superstar developers dedicated to
optimization. In this latest release, there have been some good
performance gains. You should notice the preview pane (the message
reading area below the message list) loads faster. We also did some
work to make tab switching a bit more speedy. We even did a bit of
work on the compose message tab. In addition, message sending should
be much faster, particularly if you're sending to a large number of
recipients.
Lastly, we had a look under the hood and took care of a nasty issue
where your computer would sometimes hang for a bit while you were in
the middle of composing that letter to the Y-Mail Yahoo! Group.
Not enough? Never fear. Our superstar DHTML gurus are hard at work on
the next release, working to cut down the start up time of Yahoo! Mail
Beta.
Features
The welcome page has a welcome addition: the weather! The top of the
welcome page now displays your local weather. Even better, the
location is taken directly from your Yahoo! location preference. You
can select other locations as well by clicking on the city name.
You do use Yahoo! Calendar, don't you? Well, good news then. The
calendar strip in Yahoo! Mail Beta now allows you to set reminders
when adding and editing calendar events.One usability complaint we
received had to do with search results. When viewing search results,
it wasn't always clear that something had happened when you deleted a
message (we update the location column, but that's too subtle). Now we
strikethrough the from, subject and date to let you know the message
has been moved to the trash.
Bugs
Yes, it's true...we're not perfect. To atone, we've gone back and tried
to fix some annoyances people may have been seeing in the previous
release.
And speaking of annoyances, if you're an Internet Explorer user and
you hate hearing all the clicks while you're using Yahoo! Mail Beta,
raise your hand. You're not alone, we don't like them either. So we
did some work in this release to decrease the number of click sounds
you hear when using the beta. We didn't entirely eliminate them (we're
still working on that), so if you want to disable the clicks for good
in Internet Explorer, see our earlier post on disabling clicks in
Internet Explorer or our help page, Can I turn off the "click" sounds
I hear?.
We also fixed an issue in the spam folder where the "To" column wasn't
showing up, even if you'd configured your preferences to display it.
My man Kenneth emailed me about this very problem just last week. See
Kenneth, I told you we fixed it.
Also fixed is an issue that's near and dear to my heart, using Cmd-w
on a Mac to close tabs in Yahoo! Mail Beta. Previously this shortcut
closed the browser tab immediately. In the new release, the shortcut
closes the mail tab instead, just like Ctrl-w does on a PC.
We've added Windows Vista to the list of supported operating systems.
No more seeing the "rough seas" page for Vista users!
Lastly, if you've explicitly set a reply to address, you may notice
that it's being ignored when sending mail. Not anymore! We fixed that
one too (my fault, I think that was actually my bug).
Language Support
I can't say that I speak any of these languages, but the important
news is that Yahoo! Mail Beta does. We've added support for five new
languages in this release: Mexican Spanish, Spanish for the US,
Argentinean Spanish, Indonesian and Malay.
Hack Day
Did you know that every quarter we have a hack day at Yahoo!? We do
and Yahoo!'s on the mail team have been representing well. What is
hack day? We get 24 hours to take an idea and turn it into something
that can be demoed in front of several executives and fellow
employees. This release sees one of the mail team hacks moving into
the product.
The hack (I guess it's actually a feature now since it's in the
product) allows you to quickly navigate through your messages using
the keyboard. I know, you can already use the keyboard to move up and
down your message list. Well, imagine if you took that and put it on
steroids. You'd end up with Darren's Extended Navigation Hack.
It works like this. Ctrl+Shift+Up Arrow and Ctrl+Shift+Down Arrow
allow you to move up and down your message list. But unlike just using
the Up and Down Arrow keys on their own, using Ctrl+Shift with the
arrow tells Yahoo! Mail Beta to go to the next/previous message with
the same subject. Handy, right? Well, it gets better.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Up Arrow (or Down Arrow, doesn't matter) and
you'll get a dialog box allowing you to configure how the extended
navigation works. You can select to navigate by subject (messages with
the same base subject), by flagged messages (jump from one flagged
message to the next), by unread messages (jump between unread
messages, really handy for finding that one unread message in your
20,000 message Inbox) and by messages from a sender (useful for
jumping between messages sent by your favorite Yahoo! Mail
Evangelist).
See...and you thought hacking was a bad thing.
Is that it?
It might sound like we took an awful long time to get those changes
out, but that's not all we've been working on. Our engineers have been
hard at work on IM integration and it's awesome. So awesome that I'm
going to need another post to do it the justice it deserves. So keep
your eyes open in the near future for a big post about one of the most
exciting new features ever to come to Yahoo! Mail.
If you can't wait, here's some external posts from the unveiling we
did at the Web 2.0 Conference:
* Techcrunch: Single Ajax Interface For Yahoo Mail & IM Coming
* CNET News.com: Yahoo to embed instant messaging in e-mail
* Download Squad: Yahoo! Mail to get integrated IM
Ryan Kennedy
Yahoo! Mail Beta Evangelist