Oct 26, 2005
New Hotmail interface = online Outlook
The Beta for the new Hotmail, aptly titled mail, has been released to a select few testers. Those who have been selected will be given the option to test the service when they next login to hotmail. Along with the striking new design changes come some fantastic usability features that make browsing hotmail far easier.
The new look will be instantly familiar to anyone who has used Outlook, with message information on the left, and the body of the email being displayed on the right in the reading pane. Along with this new setup, you have the ability to drag and drop emails into different folders, just as you would do in Outlook. You can also right click on emails in the information pane and choose to reply, delete, forward or print. To accompany the fresh new look Microsoft have upped the storage allowance to 2gigabytes.
Judging (only!) from the posted screenshots it does look very much like Outlook. I have great reservations about trying to adapt a regular application interface to the web. It seems in my experience it doesn’t turn out very well since they are very different beasts. Although I certainly don’t think it’s perfect, I think a simple interface like FastMail’s is much better suited for the web.
[posted with ecto]