Archive for March, 2006

Today,when i signed on to yahoo mail , there was a surprise for me.. It carried me to a well layed out screen asking for confirmation on trying Yahoo Beta Mail service.!! WOW!! Atlast they selected me for a trial.

Yahoo mail beta was launced on last agust or something and i enrolled for a beta testing on december, after their second beta release.And it took’em 3 months to approve me!! Any way, I’m in now. So its my 3rd beta testing in a week after Yahoo messenger 7.5 Beta and Internet Explorer 7 Beta.
Yahoo Mail Beta has a Gmail like AJAX interface now.That is it preloads everything including your mails,and when you click on the mail from inbox, it shows the content in a tab with out blocking inbox view.Its just like using Outbox.

It has a new way to add RSS feeds into your mail folder. For me, it’s nothing shocking. I already pull RSS feeds into Outlook folders and read them in exactly this way. But it’s nice for those who want this feature in a web-based email system.By default, if you click the Add button next to your All RSS Feeds folder, a window pops-up where you’re offered to enter feeds from places like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, News.com, Salon, Digital Photography Review and — of course — the neo999.com. OK, I joke about that last one. We don’t make that cut. But if you want this site or anything not listed, you can paste the feed into the Address box at the bottom of the Add window.

What’s very, very nice is that if you already have a My Yahoo account with feeds added, Yahoo Mail automatically lists those feeds within your All RSS Feeds folder. Great foresight on that, Yahoo!.Have multiple feeds? Each feed gets its own subfolder within the All RSS Feeds folder. You can click on a subfolder and read posts just for that feed.

Yahoo Beta Mail features drag-and-drop folder operations, multiple tabs, and more.That is, you can drag a mail from inbox to your spam folder or any other folder.Its simple!

And the Multiple tabs.. Tabs as i said in my last post is one of my favorite feature! It adds to the usability.In Yahoo Mail Beta ,you have the tab feature.If you are viewing inbox and suddenly want to compose a message,you can do it without closing inbox.Just click the compose button and a new tab is opened within the yahoo mail interface! Something that i wanted in Gmail.

Now, i wanted to test yahoo beta on IE beta.. But yahoo beta still doesnt support IE7 .:(

So, everything is fine till now,and i found some glitches.Something which can annoy you to the very extend if you are a hardcore mailer like me.

# I can’t view or sort by whether read/unread status.

# I used to be able to attach multiple files in one go … now I have to do it one at a time.

# There used to be an advanced search that allowed me to narrow down results. It seems to be missing.

In the old Yahoo Mail I used to set my items per page setting to the maximum — 200. The page would still load quick and I could scroll through the topmost 200 emails quickly and easily (and use Ctrl-F, like I mentioned above). The new Yahoo Mail doesn’t have “pages”, it’s just one giant page that loads as I scroll. There’s two problems with this: One, the load time is slow so instead of getting 200 at a time like I used to, I get one screen’s worth, and everytime the scroll bar moves just a bit, it reloads. The other is that my inbox has 3000 Messages. This makes the scrollbar very tiny, dragging it just a pixel seems to change the view in an unknown amount. Did I just skip 10 message, or 100? I don’t know. Both of these aspects add up to making it not just difficult, but impossible to visually scan a folder, even when it has as few as 75 emails in it. This
is a huge loss.

It is in no way shape or form, better than gmail except for its tabbed structure. Gmail is a MUCH better online email service. Nothing really compares to gmail as of yet even with yahoo’s new offering..The new yahoo mail beta acts and looks like a computer application, but its code is much slower than Gmail. It may get better in its final release.

So for now, Gmail is the best!

Microsoft has released a second beta version of IE7 which includes new features like the long awaited tabbed browsing.It supports RSS feed with enclosure unlike IE6 that only displayed the text in an RSS feed.I usually use FireFox as i am fedup with IE6.But now, i wanted to try IE7 with tabbed browsing(the part i like most in FireFox) . I installed the browser and then it asks for a check on “Genuine Window”. I was using a PIRATED copy and it confirmed my version as a GENUINE ONE!! After a restart IE7 was ready for a try.

First i opened Google and a nice looking pop up asked me for setting google as the default search engine for IE. Well, i downloaded the file(13.5 kb) and installed google engine .

Another option in IE7 is to check for Phishing sites.We can turn it on or off..If its on, every address is checked with microsoft Phishing DataBase.
When i checked IE7 with my own site (www.neo999.com) the site was rendered shortly after chekin with microsoft phishing DataBase.It takes a little bit time to check with DB..

Check that indication(marked in red) for phishing check.It takes a bit extra time for this check,and so i turned it off.
IE7 support multi tabbed browsing.Unlike in firefox there is a small button next to the latest tab for opening a new tab.

I heard from somewhere that IE7 can show previews of tabs when you hover mouse over it..But i cant find such an option in my beta copy.

Now the stress test.
Even though it uses less memory, opening multiple tabs costs too much cpu power..

Here i opened 4 tabs in a single IE7 window and look at the cpu utilization.I dont know why Explorer.exe is also taking this much cpu power.And now what? yea..as usual .. A CRASH!!! Lesson 1: Never test a microsot product for stability!

Another important feature in IE7 is the integrated feed reade..Its pretty good.. My server was down at the time of test (PHP rebuild or something..so i cant check it on my blog..so i checked it with Duttan ’s blog )

Clean and simple..I liked it very much..
You also have the advantage of being able to have “multiple” home pages and you can select anyone you want, more or less like a mini favourites.
They have also implemented a nice print preview and you can zoom in and out of any page.Microsoft now has an addon shop for IE7 where you can find lots of pluggins for IE7

IE7 is far far better than IE6 and have much more features than Firefox 2.0 .But its not stable.Final version may fix it up.

MobileBurn has an article that compares & contrasts the photographic capabilities of two relatively new 2 megapixel cameraphones : the Sony Ericsson K750 and the Nokia N90.

In a close call, the reviewer gives the edge to the Sony Ericsson K750. The cameras in these two phones were evaluated on the basis of sharpness, white balance, exposure, contrast, focus and low light performance.

The K750 won on the basis of its sharper lens … surprising in view of the N90’s much-vaunted Carl Zeiss optics and high price!!

Keypoints from The review :
Both are 2 megapixel units, both have auto focusing capability, and both have a history of cameras in the family (Sony’s digital cameras and Zeiss’ lenses). The K750’s camera has a slightly wider field of view, and seems to be a bit “faster” than the N90’s (meaning it needs less light) .The optical quality of the K750’s camera, which is much physically smaller than the N90’s camera, turned out to be superior in most every way. What the N90 did excel at, however, was taking photos that were generally more pleasing to the eye and less “digital” looking.
Sony Ericsson K750’s camera is capable of resolving finer detail than the Nokia N90 can. This means that small print is more readable, thin stripes stay visible, and subtle surface textures are more easily seen. You’ll also see that the K750 inflicts far less lens distortion on the photos it takes.But on the other side of the coin, you’ll see that the N90’s colors are warmer and more pleasant looking (if not always the most accurate). The N90 photos also have more color saturation, which makes them pop a bit more. Its exposure settings are, to my eyes, also closer to the ideal in more circumstances. On top of that, the N90 seems to be able to obtain focus more consistently.

So what we have is a case of the electronics company, Sony, coming up with a better lens, and the optics/phone company partnership, Zeiss and Nokia, coming up with better software and post-processing of the images. Exactly the opposite from what I was expecting.

Read the review by Michael Oryl (editor) at MobileBurn