Well, I decided to blog about Windows Live Mail this time. I have been quite impressed by it so far.

What is Windows Live Mail?

Windows Live Mail is the successor for Hotmail. It’s codename “Kahuna” and I test around it. “Kahuna” is a Hawaiian priest or traditional healer according to Encarta. It has some issues with corporate firewalls or something I think. Windows Live Mail doesn’t work at my company for the past couple of weeks already. It uses AJAX to make cool features such as spellchecking as you type, faster searches and drag-and-drop support.

What is AJAX?

I like the whole AJAX thingy that has been going on. AJAX is basically an architecture that involves JavaScript, XML, DHTML and blah blah… It basically is the most talked-about technology in the internet.

An example of an AJAX application would be Gmail. To navigate from Inbox to Outbox, your page doesn’t seem to move. Basically the page stays and the information gets delivered to the page and is updated.

Think of a desktop application, when you click and drag things around, the respond is almost immediate. You don’t have to wait long for your information to appear, there is no flicker unlike a web link to the next page too.

AJAX aims to make web application seem faster. It is not as fast as a desktop application but it aims to be near to the speed and intuitiveness of a desktop application control. And Windows Live Mail aims to have both.

Calendar, Contacts and Today

Windows Live Mail is now in Beta and my mailbox’s size is 2GB now. In this post, I’ll show you how Windows Live Mail’s Calendar and Contacts page is like.

(The calendar doesn’t have any AJAX enhancements I think.)

I don’t think the calendar receive any major update. It still seems to be the same old calendar, just that it now just a new design. It looks more pleasent to me now. I have a feeling that it loads faster too. The calendar is a slight improvement but much more can be done to improve it using AJAX. [Click here for a larger image.]

(Look! You can drag and drop contacts to manage your friends easily.)

The Contact list has been improved, you can now drag-and-drop your contacts easily. It’s a good feature. I only wish Windows Live Mail would make the importing and exporting of contacts more user-friendly. I love to be able to view all my contact’s names and email address in a form of a table too actually.

The Today page wasn’t available when I write though, it’s not ready. It suppose to have more gauge to show the remaining disk space. But it doesn’t appear to be ready at all.

More to come

Well, I’ve shown you the Contacts, the Calendar and the Today page. I haven’t shown you guys the mail, have I? I’ll get the images posted up to show how Mail looks like.