A Dedicated 9.1 User Tries Desktop, Part 3

Posted Sep 10th 2008 10:24AM by Summer

Thanks again for the new comments. I'm checking into some of them and will get back to you with what I find. In the meantime, I have now been using Desktop for a full week. Here are some things I like and some things I am having trouble adjusting to.


I'm finally getting used to closing the tab instead of the full window. However, one thing I keep forgetting is that the upper left corner is no longer "Write Mail." I keep expecting to see a blank email form every time I click it and instead I just get my inbox. Even after a week, I'm still doing it. (I'm a slow learner.)


I really like the ability to work between tabs instead of having to minimize and maximize windows repeatedly if I am using two or more Web sites at the same time. When I do minimize something, having the whole page shrink to a thumbnail in the lower left is VERY COOL. (I am also easily impressed.)


I love the reload option on the AOL Welcome screen. I especially appreciate that if something on the page changes, the reload button is available, so I am alerted to reload. With 9.1, I used to go all day with the same Welcome screen up. If I remembered to update it, I had to close the Welcome screen and then open it back up to see what (if anything) had changed.


For my mail, I really enjoyed the reading pane, but I had trouble keeping mail as New while I was using it. I tend to use the "Keep Mail as New" button as a way to stay organized and remember what I still need to respond to. With the preview pane, if I deleted an email out of my "New" folder, the next one down would show up in the preview pane and would then be considered read and automatically get moved to old, even if I hadn't read or responded to it yet. So I turned off the preview pane. I never noticed if it actually did save me time, but in reality, I suspect not.


Speaking of mail organization, I really like automatically seeing all my folders on the left. And it was easy to create new folders. I do wish I could drag and drop mail into the folders though. That would be pretty neat.


I had intended to write this week about one of my favorite topics – adding FAVORITES, but I got distracted by all these other new features as I came across them each day. So next week I will write about Favorites and the Toolbar, plus, I am going to finally figure out how to properly add another email account.

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About The Team

Terrie is the lead product manager on the AOL Desktop Affinity software. Terrie works to define new views of Desktop. Like the Asylum Desktop and LemonDrop Desktop. Take a look, they are neat!

Summer is a Sr. Manager for AOL Member Communications. While she has no ties directly to the product development team, she has been a contributor to many AOL blogs over the last few years and is excited to bring a non-product team perspective to the Desktop blog.

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