After Gnomedex in June, I flew down from Seattle to
meet with Ethan Diamond in San Francisco. Ethan is a smart young developer working for Yahoo on their new browser-based mail application. I first met him a couple of years ago when he was working on the same mail app at
Oddpost, a San Francisco-based startup that he co-founded. Before that he worked at
Half.com, where he developed an astounding browser-based spreadsheet that was demoed on a web apps
panel I led at Esther Dyson's conference in Y2K in Phoenix.
Ethan and his partners were pioneers in what's now come to be known as the AJAX method of browser-based apps. There's some very cool technology underneath their user interface, but the net-effect is that their apps look and behave like graphic-based apps, but they run in a browser. Ease of use of desktop apps, with the convenience and portability of browser-based software
In June I got the demo, saw what I expected to see, a deeper and more polished version of the app that Oddpost developed, but running inside Yahoo. It's their new user interface for mail, and it's very nice. Soon it will be offered to all Yahoo users, and at some point it will probably become the default user interface for mail on Yahoo.
Today my account was turned on -- here's what it looks like. It works exactly like you'd expect. The scroll bars work, which is a big improvement over other browser-based email apps that divide your mailboxes into pages. In Yahoo, you don't have to wait while it loads the next page. It seems to be loading the next page in the background, while you're scrolling through the previous page.
Here's a screen shot of the window for composing email.
My mail address is dwiner at yahoo dot com. Send me a question and I'll see if I can answer it. So far so good!
Postscript: Yahoo Mail works with Firefox on the Mac, but it does not work with Safari.
# Posted by Dave Winer on 9/14/05; 5:51:17 PM - --
