Guest Paul (MVP) Posted October 2, 2007 Report Posted October 2, 2007 Welcome to the first in a series of posts giving you a tour of Yahoo! Go, the nifty all-in-one application from MoDaCo supporters Yahoo! Over the coming days, i'll be giving you a heads up on the key functionality in Yahoo! Go, with step through tours, screenshots, tips and other such niceties to help you learn a little bit more about the application ;) Today we're starting with the first item on the application carousel, labelled 'Home', and in particular the 'oneSearch' functionality that is core to Yahoo! Go's operation. Before I get started a quick heads up - you can download the application for both Smartphone and Pocket PC from our featured downloads area, or by pointing your device at http://Go.MoDaCo.com. Exploring Yahoo! Go day 1... Home / oneSearch When you fire up Go, you'll be presented by a screen that looks similar to the one pictured here. On Pocket PC you'll still see the menu bar at the top, on Smartphone you'll notice the application uses all of the available real estate. Using your directional pad (or stylus on Pocket PCs), you have a number of options available at this point. I'll work from the bottom up... which brings us first to 'Address book'. The Address book can function in one of two ways. In it's simplest form, it serves as a viewer to your regular Yahoo! address book, as found at http://addresses.yahoo.com. Cool if you want to maintain an address book that is seperate from your regular contact list. When you first access your address book however, you will be asked whether you want to sync your online address book with your local address book. Should you choose to do this, the two will be merged, and your Yahoo! stored address book will be updated with changes you make on your device. Pretty nifty for a number of reasons, be it an online reference of your contacts or perhaps an online backup medium for your contact list, should you lose / hard reset / change your device. Particularly useful for those users that don't sync with Exchange, Outlook etc. The next option, the 'Calendar' works much the same way - it syncs with http://calendar.yahoo.com. One difference is that the calendar is totally independent from your device's calendar, with no option to merge the two. A number of views are available (e.g. agenda, day, week), The functionality is undoubtedly pretty basic, with no provision at this time for creating or editing events. It's effectively just a viewer... something I hope will be expanded upon in future releases! Thankfully the online calendar is fully featured, including the ability to share your calendar online for others to view (check out http://calendar.yahoo.com/modacoflickr). Above Calendar comes the 'Today' option. The first time you click this, you'll be prompted to enter your location, to allow Go to provide relevant information. I've entered 'Norwich', as you can see from the screenshots. Now when I view the Today page, I see a whole bunch of information relevant to Today in Norwich. I get links to Weather, a City Guide and links that take me directly to other Norwich related content - Norwich tagged images on FlickR, norwich tagged images on the Web, Norwich related news articles and so on. All driven by the 'oneSearch' engine. Which brings us neatly and predicatbly to the top option on this page, and the core of Go... 'oneSearch'. oneSearch is exactly what you'd imagine it to be from the name, and something of a revelation... I definitely was impressed by it's effectiveness first time I entered a query. You enter some text and it goes off and searches a host of mediums for information related to your search term. In the screenshot below you'll see the results of a seach for 'meerkat' (random, I know!) :D First up, a Wikipedia link. After another web link comes a mobile web link, followed by some relevant images and links to News and Flickr results. The concept works well, and is boosted by the fact that after clicking on a result (e.g. Wikipedia), the resulting site isn't just opened in PIE, but is rendered for the small screen using Go's own optimised renderer. You can of course hit a button to open it in your regular browser should you wish. You can also turn off images to improve performance. Finally, you can share your search results with a friend by entering a phone number or selecting them from your contacts. The link is sent via SMS by Yahoo, free, with a clickable URL in the message body. The resulting URL takes the recipient to a mobile web page version of oneSearch. Also something of a new discovery for me! :wub: And that brings to a conclusion the first part of my Yahoo! Go tour. The home item on the carousel, that actually looks the least interesting of them all, holds some cool functionality and some killer features. Stay tuned tomorrow for future installments, and as ever, feedback / comments etc. are welcome! :D P
Guest iamdecal Posted October 2, 2007 Report Posted October 2, 2007 good write up, installed on my VOX with no hassle *(well apart from you cant use landscape mode )
Guest looeee Posted October 3, 2007 Report Posted October 3, 2007 Paul Can you find out if they plan to support launch.yahoo.com ? or notepad.yahoo.com thanks looeee
Guest Mr_Gee Posted October 3, 2007 Report Posted October 3, 2007 Its a nice attempt but unfortunately still far from ready.. I selected my location (Netherlands), signed up and received an email address … ending in "yahoo.co.uk" Which is completely unusable …. I'll wait for version 2 or 3
Guest Kofman Posted October 6, 2007 Report Posted October 6, 2007 Its a nice attempt but unfortunately still far from ready.. I selected my location (Netherlands), signed up and received an email address … ending in "yahoo.co.uk" Which is completely unusable …. I'll wait for version 2 or 3 I also have similar problem. I chose Netherlands as my location and I get Dutch site! Is there a way around this? I thought location only had to do with weather, time zone etc. Choosing uk or US would bring up the english site but is it possible to choose Netherlands and be able to have english interface?
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