Microsoft Live Skydrive updated with HTML5

[TheSideshow]

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive
http://www.winrumors.com/new-version-of-windows-live-skydrive-with-html5-now-available/

It’s Faster.
■Caching and hardware acceleration – Common tasks and scenarios, like clicking on folders and navigating photo albums will go from 6-9 seconds down to 100-300 milliseconds. Microsoft has taken advantage of hardware accelerated graphics to make it fast to skip through slideshows.
■Support for HTML5 video tag – Playback H.264 videos (with support for files of up to 100MB).
■Pin SkyDrive to your taskbar – With Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7, you can pin SkyDrive to your taskbar for even faster access to the files you want. Create Word, Excel or PowerPoint docs stored in the cloud in just one click.

Is Easier to Navigate.
■All your content in one place including SkyDrive groups - Microsoft has combined all your photos, docs, files shared with you and files in SkyDrive groups into one view. The software giant took elements of the common file system you’re used to on Windows and Mac OS so navigating SkyDrive is more intuitive.
■Quick views – Microsoft incorporated navigational elements and a layout that is consistent with Hotmail (Quick Views for recent docs & files shared with you).
■Information pane - Ads have been removed to create room for a pane of information about your files – so you can take actions such as opening a doc in Word or Excel on the desktop directly from SkyDrive.

Photos are More Beautiful.
■Mosaic layout – Microsoft has removed the chrome out of the way to let your photos fill the browser. SkyDrive creates thumbnails that reflect the original aspect ratio of your picture. Portraits, landscapes and panoramas can retain their personality even in thumbnail mode.
■Clean arrangement – Regardless of what size screen you have, how big your browser window is, or how many photos you have, SkyDrive always arranges your photos into a perfect, clean square. In achieving this, we use CSS3 Transitions to add life to your photo album by animating thumbnail rearranging when you resize the browser window.
■Living, breathing presentation – When viewing your albums, SkyDrive pulses through your thumbnails, letting you experience the contents of an album even before diving in.
■Infinite scrolling – Microsoft no longer have pages in the photo viewing experience; you just scroll the page and quickly see your photos fill in. It looks and feels like a native application.

 

[roadbloc]

Cool. Used to use Skydrive when I was back at school. Not used it since though.

 

[neiltc13]

I like the way you can set it to automatically upload photos from your Windows Phone 7 device as you take them. I think another company might have thought that was a good idea recently too.

I also really like the way you can edit documents using Microsoft Office on your Windows Phone 7 device and they are automatically synced to your SkyDrive.

 

[steve2112]

It's about freakin' time. Skydrive had the chance to be iCloud long before Apple had it, but as often happens, Microsoft blew it. They had this nice 25GB of free cloud storage and did nothing with it until now. Ah well, better late than never I suppose.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

I never got into sky drive. It did not seem better than drop box for me. Drop box just seems to work better.

 

[TheSideshow]

I never got into sky drive. It did not seem better than drop box for me. Drop box just seems to work better.

For what Dropbox does its great. Skydrive has many features Dropbox doesnt compete with. Setting what folders to sync versus one dropbox folder (Mesh). Online doc editing. Collaboration (still needs work IMO). Better integration.

But if you are just looking at a way to bring certain files between devices dropbox is super easy and works well.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

For what Dropbox does its great. Skydrive has many features Dropbox doesnt compete with. Setting what folders to sync versus one dropbox folder (Mesh). Online doc editing. Collaboration (still needs work IMO). Better integration.

But if you are just looking at a way to bring certain files between devices dropbox is super easy and works well.

yeah I could see that. The collaboration part my group would do with drop box but then again we the project we were working on had a lot of different files types in it. It was funny sitting in class when someone else was working on it because in the corner of the screen you would see pop up after pop up of files uploads.

I will look into skydrive more but sadly I do not see it playing nice with an android phone.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

It's about freakin' time. Skydrive had the chance to be iCloud long before Apple had it, but as often happens, Microsoft blew it. They had this nice 25GB of free cloud storage and did nothing with it until now. Ah well, better late than never I suppose.

All they did was change the web interface, Skydrive was and still is, the same. But as often happens, iSheep are unable to tell the difference between a GUI update and a product.

 

[steve2112]

All they did was change the web interface, Skydrive was and still is, the same. But as often happens, iSheep are unable to tell the difference between a GUI update and a product.

Still, that was a big improvement. But my bigger gripe, and one of the things that drive me crazy about MS, is nobody knows they have it. I remember hearing about Skydrive a couple of years ago on a Windows Weekly podcast and I thought it was cool. 25GB of free online storage? Sure. That blows away iDisk/MobileMe. But nobody knew about it, and they never did anything with it. Microsoft could have made it seamlessly integrate into Windows 7, but they didn't. And it still doesn't.

Microsoft has been running those annoying "To the cloud!" commercials, yet didn't do a thing with their cloud service for end users. Apple announces it, and it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

 

[*LTD*]

Still, that was a big improvement. But my bigger gripe, and one of the things that drive me crazy about MS, is nobody knows they have it. I remember hearing about Skydrive a couple of years ago on a Windows Weekly podcast and I thought it was cool. 25GB of free online storage? Sure. That blows away iDisk/MobileMe. But nobody knew about it, and they never did anything with it. Microsoft could have made it seamlessly integrate into Windows 7, but they didn't. And it still doesn't.

Microsoft has been running those annoying "To the cloud!" commercials, yet didn't do a thing with their cloud service for end users. Apple announces it, and it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

MS and marketing don't go together.

 

[MonksMac]

Hmm. Well, even if it's only a cosmetic update that automatically makes it look nicer than before...

My school (University) gives each student a Skydrive account. I will admit it is nice to have Office "in the cloud" so to speak.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

I'm pretty sure the only reason that MS's cloud services weren't integrated into Windows was due to the anti-trust regulations. Now that they're not bound by those rules anymore, the rumors for Windows 8 include integrated skydrive, user accounts that sync with the cloud, etc..

 

[rikscha]

still no option to integrate skydrive into my system the same way as idisk works?