The @Mail staff attended the Web Directions South Conference at Sydney, Australia on the 27th/28th Sept, all about Web Usability, Design, Web standards and the future of Web technologies.

The event was a huge success with over 500 of the most talented and influencial people in the industry in Australia and abroad attending.One of my highlights for the event was speaking with Chris Wilson, the Group Program manager of IE and one of the original developers for IE since v2.0 - Discussions on Microsoft’s next version named IE.Next, and the complexities of designing new browsers while maintaining all the old hacks and workarounds designers made for IE5/6.

My top 3 quotes I glemed from the event include:

• Web 2.0 is “caring about the quality of the web User-interface” - Creating a better user experience - Chris Wilson (Microsoft)
• Human Traffic: Too many options is lazy design - Highlight defaults as recommended - George Oates (Flickr)
  
• You can’t make a design thats perfect for everyone - Andy Clarke (W3C)

It was a great event, and to meet other successful Australian Web-software companies making a big impact.

The @Mail development team leaders have just informed me of 2 hot new items:

Try it on demo.atmail.com !

Pretty:

• This feature is incredibly useful, and beautiful. The smoothness of the interface rivals or exceeds that of a desktop app.

• Further improvements to this area of the calendar are already in development, so we’re calling it a Beta Feature for now.

In the upcoming patch release, @Mail 5.11 (coming soon!), we can also look forward to:

Powerful:

• Effortlessly manage your email from Outlook 2007 or the @Mail Webmail interface.

• Enjoy the freedom that @Mail delivers via powerful, professional tools.

We want to hear from you! Tell us what you think:

We’re very pleased to release @Mail version 5.1.

Our expanding team of developers have been working at a high level of efficiency and skill to bring us this release, which is an important milestone in the PHP release cycle, delivering an improved codebase with all important known issues resolved.

See the changelog for an impressive list of changes since 5.07.

Highlights of this release:

* New Weekly Calendar View
* Schedule Reminders
* Improved Websync Support
* Email-to-Folder Sorting

Existing customers can upgrade to the latest version via the Client Interface.

Direct-download Evaluation versions are available for testing on your own system, or view the Online Demo for instant access to test-drive @Mail.