Re: OT: What would it take to make AOL impressive to Mac users?
Re: OT: What would it take to make AOL impressive to Mac users?
- Subject: Re: OT: What would it take to make AOL impressive to Mac users?
- From: AOLDev <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 18:19:54 -0500
Thanks for your comments everyone. The good news is that there's a
major corporate shift at the highest of levels to support the Mac. AOL
is a fast-moving company despite what you might hear in the media about
us merging into a huge media giant. Our HR department does a good job
of ensuring that our "internet corporate culture" doesn't get impacted
by the Time-Warner corporate culture.
What you see now with the Mac OS X beta is nothing compared with what
you'll see in a few months. This business with the Mac client being
behind and stuck at version 5.0 is over. Wouldn't it be cool to have
iDisk-like access to your free AOL FTP account? Wouldn't it be cool to
have an "aqualike animated branding bar on sign-on, like Apple has on
the OS X setup/registration screens? How about some sort of Quicktime
streaming media integration? I'm not at liberty to discuss specifics at
present, but let's just say that the complete UI is getting overhauled
for the better. Thanks to the success of Steve Jobs and the iMac and
the ease of OS X app development, you're going to see a lot more
emphasis on AOL Mac development from now on.
Thanks also to those mentioning other places to post - - I'll try those
areas as well.
On Tuesday, March 26, 2002, at 05:14 PM, Andy Lee wrote:
Isn't the OS X client already out? I was having trouble getting it
from aol.com (broken links), so I thought maybe it wasn't really. But
then I noticed the installer for it is included on an iLamp that was on
display in a store. So I looked around and finally downloaded it from
somewhere (I forget where) and installed it. The Finder shows the
version to be "AOL v5.0".
I don't subscribe to AOL myself, but I have friends and relatives who
do, on Wintel machines. I would love to persuade them all to choose
Macs as their next computer, and this would be much easier if there
were an OS X version of AOL that is not only not "second-class" but
*superior* to earlier versions.
I've only had glimpses of AOL on Wintel, but it looks like the OS X
version is a direct clone. This is probably comfy and familiar to AOL
users, but personally I find the UI ugly and unintuitive. My *gut*
feeling (obviously not based on extensive product experience) is that
it should be overhauled at the highest design level, not just tweaked
at the itty-bitty feature level. I would be delighted if AOL would
launch a makeover project for the client UI.
Given that AOL is a humongous entrenched corporate entity, I'd be
surprised if such a project had a chance in heck of getting off the
ground -- but you did say "all areas are fair game"...
--Andy
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