The new Outlook and Skydrive

Recently Microsoft has been modernizing it's  core products in quite a fast pace. I've already talked about Windows 8, but now also Outlook.com and Skydrive.com have new, fresh and modern appearance and they're totally worth a try.

SkyDrive
 

I've used SkyDrive a lot in the past year because of the great integration with my Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone. Instead of always connecting my phone to the computer to download the images, I quite often upload them to the cloud storage straight from my phone. The SkyDrive app on WP7 is pretty neat, but now that Skydrive.com has been totally modernized, I'm very pleased to use it on my computer.

The interface is very clear, simple and fits greatly to the browser window. You can easily have side panel to show extra info, or access the settings or social media share options, etc. The new SkyDrive site uses some modern HTML techniques that enables e.g. re-arranging photos with drag-and-drop gestures and uploading photos by dragging them from your desktop to the browser window, skipping the annoying "Select files to upload" type of dialogs!

One of the few things that annoy me is the fact that you can't rotate images that are already uploaded to SkyDrive. That should be fixed since sometimes the camera doesn't get the rotation of the image right, causing many portrait images rotated into landscape pics.

Outlook.com

I haven't used Hotmail much since it's always been my secondary email, but with the re-branding (to Outlook.com) I'm considering using it more than before. First of all the web email interface is better than anything else I've tried, even Gmail seems less easy to use compared to it. You can change the interface main color, reading pane position and more very easily.

One cool thing is also an extra panel that shows social media (FB, Twitter) content from the person who's email you are reading, nice! You can also chat on Facebook (also on SkyDrive) directly from Outlook.com without need to swap back to other browser tab or window. It's the same high social media integration that I've seen on Windows Phone.

Outlook.com could have many inboxes, from 3rd party services like Gmail, but I haven't tried that yet. What I did like was the option to create aliases for my old Hotmail account. The old email, macjuhruo@hotmail.com, obviously isn't the best possible, so just with few clicks I created a juho.ruohola@outlook.com alias that automatically forwards the mails to my Hotmail-account and inbox. There's still plenty of settings and stuff I haven't tried, but overall the impression of outlook.com is very positive.