Microsoft launched the new version of HTML 5 enabled SkyDrive, their unified way to store your data online. The feature just rolled out to about 100 million users today and it works really great.
Some of the highlighted features that we tested and Microsoft revealed are:
- Secure
- Faster
- Easier to navigate
- New Photo viewer (Smooth and has got a great UI)
- Skydrive groups
- Pin Skydrive to taskbar
- Supports HTML 5 video tag
Secure:
- SSL enabled for all pages
- No junk URLs
Faster:
- Skydrive is now improved and is really fast. The load time for folders and other features have been reduced to 100-300 millisecond from 5-6 seconds.
- Hardware acceleration for playing presentations and other media contents
Easier to navigate:
- Microsoft has now combined all the related file types into groups.
- The new navigation elements allows you to take a preview of the files and docs that were shared with you.
- A new information bar has been added, after removing Ads. The information bar is more like the Windows menu bar. You can choose from options like Download, Open file in Word, Excel, etc.,
- Reduced header size.
- HTML 5 enabled dynamic page sizing.
- Can be viewed in Smartphones
New Photo Viewer:
- Microsoft has added a new Mosaic layout. The layout is really neat and has come as a replacement for the usual Chrome layout.
- Other regular layouts like the portrait, landscape and panoramic layouts still exists for thumbnails.
- Another major change is the infinite photo scrolling, like Google Image search.
- Cleaner and uncluttered UI
- Images (thumbnails) on photo album view rearrange as the browser window resizes.
- Added CSS 3 transactions
- Point on a album thumbnail and it will show the information of the album.
Skydrive Groups:
- The Skydrive groups provides easier access to the contents you’ve grouped.
- Skydrive now automatically groups your content by default based on the file type.
Pin to superbar:
- You can now pin skydrive to your Windows 7 Superbar. Feels more like a desktop app.
HTML 5 videos:
- Skydrive now renders HTML 5 videos in H.264 video format. And is hardware accelerated.
Video demo:
Here’s a video demo of the new Skydrive for the modern web.
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