Wednesday, March 28, 2007

My Yahoo: Review

I have been using the new My Yahoo since few days now, and as I said in my last post I'm quite impressed by the overall redesign effort. There are few things that I wish were implemented though:
  1. The Mail widget is a nice way of getting previews of your latest mails but surprisingly lacks a "Compose" link (even more surprising cause Yahoo! does have a shortcut for that), that way I don't have to click on "Mail Preview" to first go to my mail inbox and then click on Compose.
  2. The individual mail previews within the widget should also have a delete icon: given that these days I get more spam in my inbox than legit emails (which by the way is better than getting all legit mails delivered to the Junk folder: the issue that I earlier had with my Y! Mail).
  3. Perhaps mail previews should also have some kinda "Quick Reply" which pops up a div with a text area from where I can send a quick & short reply (honestly I haven't sent anyone a long reply since ages).
  4. The individual widgets need to have a refresh link so that I can just refresh one feed rather than having to refresh the entire My Y!
  5. Provide a keyboard shortcut for adding a RSS by URL and make it more prominent, right now it's buried deep inside some Advanced Settings: it took me a while finding that one.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Faces in Picasso's notebook

Most of the people who know me, know that I love photography. Once upon a time I had a use-n-throw camera, then a Pentax roll camera and now a Canon A95. Everyone asks me that if I love photography so much, why don't I get myself a DSLR and I always have one answer: I don't have a subject worthy enough a DSLR (...and when I had one, I coudn't afford the camera).

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Time traveller

4 years back on this day, being in a train on a 36 hour long journey to meet someone for the first time after 13 years, so many thoughts pass through your mind: what if it doesn't work out right; what if we don't even know what to talk about. Then the moment finally arrives; and you are standing in front of each other, seeing the other person in flesh, someone to whom you've talked over the phone for about a month before this day and you finally let the feeling sink in and realize it''s kind of different, different in a good way. You talk, you laugh together, you share things you'd been doing over the last 13 years and try to hold on to the moment before they slip away from you again....4 years later....only two words: Happy Birthday!

My Yahoo! makeover


It's been more than 5 years since I've been using My! Yahoo as my home page; so it is nice to know that they finally did some makeover. So what did I do? well, I played around with it for sometime and it sure is way better than its previous incarnation. The mail preview is there ala Google Home page, the RSS posts can be read in-place (I still prefer something like bloglines over Google/Yahoo/Live Home Page as in case of start pages, you have to click on individual posts to read their summary/text; unlike the real RSS aggregators where you can read all the posts in one go without having to click many times). The interface is slick, fast, with tooltip previews to get quick summary about a post and integration with Yahoo! Reader.

All in all, quite impressed with the end (beta) product, and in case you're wondering how it is different from Google Home page or Live.com, well; it's not different from either of them though eye candy wise I'd rate: My Yahoo!, then live.com and then Google Home page.

PS: The screen clippings were taken using Office One Note (even though Vista has a built in Screen Clipper), something that I'm really impressed with.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Friday, March 02, 2007

sometimes...

I just feel like writing something; so this post is not going to make any sense...just like all other posts on this blog...

Sometimes we find it so hard to convince ourselves that we're done, we're done trying, done hanging on, done waiting for things to happen; no, the things we've been waiting for; still mean a world to us, it's just that we accept that we can't do anything to change the way life is...life is just one manifestation out of the infinite possibilities; and most of the times it's not us who choose the outcome. That also reminds me about us and our free will, yes; we absolutely have free will: it's akin to: "you can choose any color (manifestation) as long as it is black (outcome)."