Rashid Saeed

I just received new promotion email from Microsoft with a . They always inspire me with glossy looks and crispy graphics, so easy on eyes. May be because emails are usually supposed to be stuffed with text all the time and hardly any rich media is involved so I always look forward for such emails. This time around it was even more exciting as it was about the all new MSN Toolbar. Here’s the screenshot of the email:

 

It didn’t take me more than a minute to click and download the toolbar. It took a while to install it, because, I suppose, because I didn’t have SilverLight installed and the toolbar is “Powered by SilverLight”. It was worth the wait though; I fell in love with the MSN Toolbar at first sight. It looked so glossy and pleasantly animated that it made the Google Toolbar look like the one from Stone Age. Have a look at the graphic below:

It makes Google toolbar so out of fashion, doesn’t it? And from all it looks it proves to be coming straight from Windows Live family. It fits so well with Windows Vista and IE and also with Windows Live services like Live Mail to make those services a pleasure to use.
Finally the weather feature looks so awesome, so useful and makes your day even brighter. It works in a way pretty similar to weather widget in Vista where user can change his desired weather location. Other toolbar functions, however, lack such customization. User can change the look and feel of the toolbar by changing colors scheme but there’s no feature like “custom buttons”. But it’s not much useful of features anyway.
Would’ve loved if they could introduce a website ranking meter like Google’s flagship PageRank to create some more fuss from nothing, for nothing, like folks at Google did! Keeping inventing Microsoft, you rock!