Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Yahoo Buys Zimbra

Zimbra was just bought by Yahoo. Never heard of them but they seem to have a pretty nice mail/calendar program. I watched the Zimbra demos. I'm not impressed with drag and drop calendaring or threaded mail views, that's basic functionality these days. The UI is a combo of the mac's brushed metal with rounded boxes and Window's ugly toolbar icons with text to the right. On the whole it does look like a nice product and I like that they seem dedicated to supporting other client apps not just their own.

Their cool feature is the hovering and autolink generation. It recognizes phone numbers and lets you click on them to call with skype and addresses can easily be shown in google maps. It can be extended by a company to include tracking numbers and the like.

I like this feature so much I had written an Emacs package called mouseme to do the same thing in 1997. Since I used Emacs for everything (mail, news, calendar, programming, etc.) I had these features no matter I was doing. Whether there was a bug number in an mail message or a code comment, I could click it and see the bug report in the bug database in my browser. I do the same thing now on the mac with Quicksilver. It's a few more steps, typically I highlight something and hit a keystroke to perform a search in wikipedia, google, google maps, imdb, etc. I can also do other things like start a mail message, sms, phone call, calendar appointment, etc. Again this works in any app on the mac not just my mail/calendar.

I guess I should have formed a company to do this stuff.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

zimbra was (one) option to link mac contact/calendar data to salesforce.com, but it required 2-3 levels of removed synching and i decided i didn't want to touch it