Hotmail, now and next month
Thursday, May 27 2010
The new header
When the new version - titled the Wave 4 release - of the Windows Live Internet Services such as Live Hotmail, Live Office, Live Photos and Live Skydrive begins rolling out next month, the first change we'll see is a new header on each Live web page.
Services provided in Wave 4, and available from the header page links, will consist of Windows Live (e.g. a link to Skydrive), Hotmail (with separate links to the Inbox, Calendar, Contacts or Send an email), Messenger (to load the web version directly on the Live page you're viewing), Office (to view, edit or create Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint or Word documents) and Photos (to access recent photos and your albums).
Everybody will be happy to know that you only need to hover over an item on the new Wave 4 header to bring up its submenu of options - no more clicking to view the submenus.
Save time - eliminate the clutter
The old Hotmail for many years has had the ability to move mail from our Inbox to a selected folder that we created to hold, for example, all the email from a certain person, organisation or just to group it in one folder by topic. To do the job manually is pure pain time-wise. You can use Hotmail's rules to direct posts from a certain email address but that doesn't cover all situations.
Wave 4 Hotmail will have a Sweep feature to efficiently move all email of a certain type to a particular folder (for example, think of all those eBay or Facebook notifications that clutter your inbox). Select one particular type of email and get Sweep to move all such posts.
Photo attachments
One of the biggest humbugs with attaching photos to an email post has been the limit placed on the size of the recipient's email content if they're not using Windows Live.
Up to this point we've used the Send a link option in our Live Photos albums to either notify specific people we've uploaded a new album or to inform those not on Windows Live to view our latest photos.
The Wave 4 Hotmail will have the ability to include up to 10 gigabytes (yes, 10 gigabytes, that is, 10 000 megabytes) of photos in an email. This will work by uploading the photos to a folder on our Live Skydrive and then provide a link for the recipient to view and/or download the photos. In other words, Hotmail itself will provide a method similar to what we've been using in Live Photos.
Do more in the one place
If we're the recipient of a post with photos attached, we'll be able to view them in a slideshow from within Hotmail itself. Similarly if we receive a post with a movie attached, we can view it directly in Hotmail.
Active View is the name given to being able to view content in Hotmail without having to follow a link to another site or program so we remain in Hotmail through the whole process of catching up on our mail.
The Office Web Apps (Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word) will also be a part of Hotmail's Activie View so, for example, we can edit a document that a friend has asked for help with from Hotmail and save it back, without the need for a round trip through desktop Office.
Messenger
We'll be able to sign in to the web version of Messenger whenever we're in Hotmail and chat directly to those we see online. The Messenger pane will stay with us as we navigate to other Windows Live web services. It's got the tabbed conversations feature and can be placed wherever we please on the page or left to sit at the bottom right of the page.
Other features
The Wave 4 version of Hotmail has many more features including more security (e.g., Trusted Senders will be marked for easy recognition), Quick View to display just those emails you've received containing documents or photos, and Highlights that displays posts you've received from friends, social networks or birthday reminders, for example.