Yahoo! is hard at work on its turnaround under CEO
Marissa Mayer’s direction. Lately, Yahoo! news has focused on housekeeping decisions, like her call to bring remote workers back to the office, but today we’re seeing some new products – namely, Yahoo! Mail apps for tablets and the Yahoo! Weather App for iOS phones.
Mail is now available as an app for both Android and iOS devices. Until now, you probably accessed your Yahoo! Mail via a browser on your tablet. Once you download the new app, you’ll be looking at a new, more touch-friendly interface. The app lets you grab multiple emails with a swipe and supports starring, moving, and deleting messages to make it easy to organize your email from the tablet. A small, tappable toolbar floats over your inbox and individual emails.
Then there’s the Yahoo! Weather App for
iPhone, iPod, and iPod touch. With this app, Yahoo! is taking a “show, don’t tell” approach to weather forecasting – open the app, and you’ll see photos (from Yahoo!-owned
Flickr, of course) that depict the weather in your area. You can also swipe to “see” the weather in other locations, while tapping and swiping will take you to detailed forecasts and radar maps.
Both the Yahoo! Mail and
Yahoo! Weather apps are available for free today. Having fooled around with the Yahoo! Weather app a bit, my initial impression is that the images for big cities are much more fun than they are for smaller towns (a stadium in San Francisco, but what appears to be a parking lot in Lincoln, NE, for example). By the sound of the
blog post today by Yahoo! Director of Mobile and Emerging Products Marco Wirasinghe, the images available to the app will likely grow with time.
