Pre-ordered Snow Leopard and received it on Friday (the official release day) afternoon via Fedex. For a total order of $29 this is some treatment.
The upgrade was smooth for me. Just pop in the DVD and let it run the course. There are some nice interface tweaks, and not to mention the saved disk space. But a few enhancements that I like the best are:
- Access over local network are much much faster. I have a shared drive in the LAN and it used to be a pain to view large images and QuickTime movie files over the network. After the upgrade, the delay is gone and the video plays smoothly.
- The new QuickTime Player has the video, audio and screen recording built in now. Since my MacBook has the camera and microphone built in, making an video is as conveniently as making a few clicks and start talking.
- The Microsoft Exchange support. Works very well. Enough said.
I’m no Apple fanboy but sometimes I love using Apple product because it provides an “environment”. An environment that has a nice mixture and balance of great design and usability. For us web builders, this is both an influence and inspiration. It helps us, in a subtle way, to make product with good taste and also works.
So the new Yahoo home page has been rolled out for a few weeks. For the most part, I like the new home page. It provides more information with some seemingly moderate changes. However, there are a couple of design points that I think can be made better.
The first is the big flyout from the “MY FAVORITES” menu. Basically when you move your mouse over an item, a flyout will pop out. I know it has its own merit, and the feature gives visitors shortcuts under the main category. But a big flyout box that fills out most part of the web page can be quite annoying, especially sometimes it was triggered by an accidental hover over the links. Any most of time I just want to click on the menu and go to my favorite subject – with this flyout action, I have to deal with some “delay” before getting where I want to go.
My suggestion: make the flyout smaller, simpler and more importantly, to load quicker.
Same place, “MY FAVORITES” list can get longer and there is not enough slots to display all of them, to find the rest of the favorites, I have to click on a little “>” button to sort of go to the second page of the favorites.
Why not make this one a flyout then? Definitely the right feature for the right place.
Update:
Looks like Yahoo just updated their page design. Now when you hover over the left menu, a much smaller flyout will show, which you can click on to open the quick view. Much better design than kicking open the annoying page view blocker directly.