Zoho is always up to something. The company that seems like it never stops to breath has released another update to their Zoho suite, Start.

The Start beta is a not another Zoho application, it is merely an integrated Start page for all of your other Zoho applications. Think of it as a desktop for all things Zoho. When logging in at zoho.com, users are forwarded to start.zoho.com which aggregates all Zoho data for the user account. The current version of Zoho Start integrates Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show, with all data having the ability to be tagged with keywords, shared, exported and organized all from this simple interface.

Thanks Zoho, for making it extra difficult to choose between Zoho's suite of applications, and Google's Docs/Apps.

If you are a big fan of custom start pages like the new MyYahoo, and a user of a POP mail account, you might get excited about a new feature Yahoo has added.

In iGoogle, you can only pull in your Gmail account, well, Yahoo thought hey, why not, let's make it so that any mail account can get imported into our customers start pages in the new MyYahoo. So they came out with the POP Mail module that launched yesterday; Pull in mail from any mail account, Yahoo or not, as long as it supports POP.

Yahoo also added in a Gmail module, because hey why not allow Google's Gmail users the ability to pull in their mail. If you want to get hooked up with the new My Yahoo beta that serves this content, sign up for an upgrade if you haven't already, and you'll be on your way. The page is clean and as easy to use at Netvibes. However, even though I enjoyed having the Gmail/POP modules preview my emails, when emails are clicked out to read more, you will have to sign into your email account. A little hassle, but that could be easily forgotten about. Yahoo is on their way to building a serious contender here, and it's definitely one you might want to consider. Netvibes is still a leader in this space, and is for sure a location that Yahoo and other "start pages" want to study when finding out what works, especially when it comes to a clean and uncluttered space. In other words, if My Yahoo got rid of that giant ad, and tightened up the top of the page so that we could fit in more content, it might get a little higher on the list.

MyYahoo has also updated their Scoreboard, Weather and Shopping modules.

Windows keeps the Start button, taskbar and system tray at the bottom of the display and a menubar in every window. Mac OS X keeps one main menubar at the top of the display, with a 'dock' of larger icons that take the place of the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the display. Linux, for the most part, seems to prefer the Windows UI, typically using a taskbar-like system with menubars again in every window, but through the power of Open Source, you can do just about anything you want to the Linux UI to make it feel more like home. Some people find one approach more useful, while others prefer a different side of the fence. While the debate surrounding one's OS preference isn't showing any signs of subsiding, we thought it might be useful to offer at least a little insight and theory into why some fundamentals of Mac OS X are designed so differently.

One of the basic principles that informs the Mac OS X menubar is something called Fitts' Law, which I first learned about from John Gruber of Daring Fireball in a post here. To keep things brief, however, I'll just quote a short introduction from the Wikipedia:

In ergonomics, Fitts' law is a model of human movement, predicting the time required to rapidly move from a starting position to a final target area, as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts' law is used to model the act of pointing, both in the real world, for example, with a hand or finger and on computers, for example, with a mouse.

To summarize: Fitts' Law is about how far you have to travel to hit a target, and how easy that target is to hit. Apple implemented these concepts (and I'm sure plenty of others) when designing their menubar by pinning it to the very top of the display, not only from a hierarchal standpoint (you can always look to the very top left of your display to find out exactly which app you're in), but also from a 'make it easy as possible to hit this' perspective. You can simply fling your mouse 'up' and you're at the menubar; even if you click on the very top-most pixel above File, Edit or Help, you'll still hit that menu item and activate it. It's a seemingly minor detail, but one that can help quite a bit during one's daily computing.

This concept is also present in other major OS interfaces, such as the Windows Start button; fling your mouse 'down and left', click and you'll hit the One Button to Rule Them All. Mac OS X's Apple and Spotlight menus also function the same way: fling your mouse 'up and to the left', click in the furthest pixel up there and you'll activate the Apple menu; 'up and to the right', and you're in Spotlight.

If anything, the main point we want to get across is that there is typically a lot of theory that goes into the design of an OS and how users interact with it. We might not always agree with the approach taken by one camp or another, but at least people are thinking about this stuff, because even in 2007, computers still aren't that intuitive to some users who have yet to hop on board the digital train. The more thought, consistency and intuitiveness OS engineers design into our software, the easier it will be for everyone to come along for the ride, no matter what side of the car they're sitting on.

Netvibes has announced a few colorful updates to their online service. The Coriander release brings with it improvements from numerous suggestions.

First off, Netvibes Coriander gets an improved RSS experience. Even though we really didn't think the old version was bad, Netvibes now has the ability to use multimedia content from blogs and news feeds without ever leaving the page. Listen to podcasts, view videos, and play games right on the start page.

Sharing customized Netvibes content is now pretty simple to do. Click on the arrow in your content feed window and choose whether you want to share the feed, module or widget via email, IM, or even drop it on a blog or website with some HTML code.

Maps now have a new search module in the Coriander release. Craigslist was brought on board in the first round of changes, and now there is a Map Comparison Search module that can be added to pages.

The final addition to the mix is the new personalization feature. Users can add a subtle touch to the Netvibes interface by changing colors of the module windows.

Lifehacker has a great tip on launching your most-used programs really quickly. It relies on the little-known (well, I didn't know it, at least) fact that when the Windows Start menu is open, pressing a letter on your keyboard will launch the first "pinned" shortcut that begins with that letter. Armed with this knowledge, you can prefix the names of shortcuts pinned to your XP Start menu with unique letters to make launching any of your 26 favorite programs as quick as pressing the Windows key and a letter. Very awesome.