However, as I said in the last post, I am still compelled to check Hotmail now and again as I still have a few emails of importance coming in between the far more steady stream of spam. Clearing my inbox today I noticed the Live Mail team have changed the way the inbox interface is laid out. The main difference is that the checkbox for each item now shares its place with the new mail icon:

Basically both icons toggle depending on whether the email is new and/or selected. In practice this is just really bemusing to use. If you want to select messages to delete or move, there is no obvious checkbox. When you work out they’re hiding between mail icons (emphasis on hidden here), the actual task of selecting the check boxes requires a high degree of accuracy: the checkbox is sitting on anchor block linking to the email message, so if you’re slightly off target with the small checkbox you end up opening a message as opposed to selecting it.

And my last gripe is that the checkbox/mail icon column doesn’t line up with the master select checkbox in the top left corner. There is actually room for the checkbox to sit next to the mail icon and be underneath this master selector. Wouldn’t that make far more sense?

I don’t know what the rationale behind the design of this is, but the caveat here is that this is a beta product after all. Although I made that point in my last blog entry as well, after pointing out Live Mail was purely IE6 (now IE7 as well). Windows Live Mail now loads in Firefox 2.0, although load is a pretty abstract concept:

24 errors/504 warnings? Nice.

And for the record, Live Mail is still long way off the simplicity and usability of Gmail.

Gmail killer?

Obviously Live Mail is an attempt to catch up with Gmail, which has been wildly popular since arriving two years ago and shaking up the webmail world with its spiffy AJAX-driven interface and huge two gigabytes of space.

The process of moving from normal Hotmail to the new Live Mail is very cumbersome. It initially comprises of several screens for setting user preferences.

The sent mail option is quite absurd. Gmail saves everything – why wouldn’t you want to keep sent messages? Not autosaving sent messages is a horrible feature of the 2mb-per-user webmail days that should have been forgotten long ago. And you only get 30 days!

The colour-scheme option is nice, and thus far Gmail can’t compete – but its a very trivial feature (note: I couldn’t help but pick the worst possible colour scheme, as I did with Google Page Maker).

More AJAXery

The name ‘Live Mail’ alludes to a slick AJAX-driven interface, and Live Mail does deliver on this functionality, even down to a very familiar loading alert — a very atypical swirly loading animation (which looks uncannily similar to the Firefox loading icon).

One nice feature of Live Mail is automatic spell checking, complete with Office-style zig-zag red underlining. Right-clicking on a word presents alternative spelling suggestions as you’d expect.

The ‘To’ field has an excellent contacts list feature. It’s a fairly simple feature that lets you select names from your contacts next to the ‘To’ field. Such functionality, albeit very basic, is surprisingly missing from Gmail. You can also email to a group of contacts as they appear in MSN Messenger, another handy feature.

Cramped layout

While there are some good features in Live Mail, the layout is still quite cramped — very frame-driven, much like the desktop Outlook. There is a lot of wasted space around the banners, which could be tightened up. Unfortunately Microsoft are still sticking with the graphical banner ad, even though Google’s targeted text ads are far less imposing, far less garish and far more relevent to users. And they are still pulling in big bucks.

By moving the search box down and spreading the username and logout options out, Live Mail could save a lot of space.

Conversations?

One disappointment with Live Mail is that there is currently no option to sort mail by conversations (even Outlook 2003 has that feature). For me, this has become by far the most efficient way to organise my email — not only is there the obvious and logical grouping of the same messages, but Gmail also combines all messages into one parent ‘message’, which saves an awful lot of screen space.

But I think the biggest disappointment with Live Mail is that it’s ‘enhanced’ mode is built exclusively for Internet Explorer 6.

It’s 2006, and I can’t believe Microsoft have built this purely for IE6. It’s just sheer laziness. As a developer I spent more time developing for IE6 than any other current browser. But, again, this is only a beta product — hopefully Microsoft will clean up their lax browser support in the future. However, I’m really not tempted in the slightest to switch back to Microsoft for my webmail, as Gmail is still streets ahead.