I been meaning to post something on here about the latest Microsoft idea. With the immergence of Web 2.0, Microsoft needed to jump on the ol’ bandwagon as soon as they could. So their brilliant idea was to label all their new apps as “Live” and integrate them with the web.

My thoughts on it - awesome. They say the future of the web is that site will act and feel just like any other windows application. Seemlessly loading and validation without having to reload the page. Microsoft needs to play catch-up. As far as web applications, they’re far behind.

So why am I saying all this. Well in early December I got an invite to the beta version of the next version of hotmail. Intriged, I accepted. Now I don’t use my hotmail account for my regular email, but I thought I’d make take a look at least and see what they had to offer.

My thoughts: Good and bad.

Good

• Simple - simple makes it easier to navigation and just looks cleaner
• AJAX - for those of you who don’t know what this is, it stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. Basically what this means is that a webpage can reload data, without reloading the page. So your saying, so what? Because I get paid for being a programmer (and a web programmer sometimes), this makes programming in the web, similiar to windows apps. There’s no more “flicker” when a page reloads as it posts to the database.
• 2 GB Mail Size - Think Microsoft finally realizes that they need to play catch up to Google.

Bad

• Compatibility - Still not fully compatible with Firefox and other browsers. They do state on the page that it currently isn’t compatible, but they are working on it to make it. Guess only time will tell.
• Window Sizes - With the 3 tier sort of aspect of the windows, it makes the email window small. I hope in future versions, they allow you move around windows, hide/collapse them. How about making them horizontal instead of vertical to save space?

As I stated before, I don’t use hotmail for regular emails, but just for my messenger account, I can’t say ya or nay on it just yet. After using gmail for quite some time now (mattkiazyk@gmail.com) I’m quite used to it and am starting to love it.