Outlook 2007 sucks

Bor­ing post sub­ject, I know. But check this out:

Outlook is preparing the requested view

Took around a full minute for the folder to load, on an Athlon 64 3200+ clocked at 2.4GHz with 2GB of fairly quick memory.

Since when do apps alert in the tray about load­ing a view? If Out­look didn’t expend resources on a generally-useless tray icon (really, it doesn’t even change when you have new mail wait­ing), maybe it wouldn’t take so bloody long to do anything.

I’ve got a dual core 4200+ on the way, but really doubt it’ll make any dif­fer­ence when the fault is largely soft­ware that sucks. Not say­ing that it’s just Out­look at fault… I’m inclined to place a fair degree of blame on the well-known-to-be-sucky Win­dows Desk­top Search. But it just inte­grates best… why does Microsoft have to pro­duce prod­ucts that suck?!

Speak­ing of which, my iPaq is work­ing again with a brand new extended bat­tery. Apart from the slow proces­sor, it’s doing great… but I’m going to test-drive a Palm Z72 for a few days and see if it does any bet­ter. Basi­cally, I don’t really need the GSM/GPRS func­tion­al­ity on the iPaq because it’s faster for me to con­nect via my Sony Eric­s­son via Blue­tooth (as there’s no HSDPA on the iPaq). I’ll imme­di­ately miss the wire­less, but have sur­vived sev­eral months with­out it, and SDiO wifi cards are a pos­si­bil­ity for the palm… I doubt they’re par­tic­u­larly com­mon, though. Have been con­sid­er­ing a Black­berry, but they’re pretty restricted in a whole heap of ways that PDAs aren’t. For exam­ple, ever tried get­ting an SSH client on a Black­berry? I haven’t. But have my doubts it could be done!

Any­way. Don’t use Out­look 2007 unless you have to.  It has nice multi-calendar/iCal sup­port, but that’s about all it has going for it. Still no inbuilt SMS/MMS sup­port, the ren­derer is a regres­sion in the truest sense of the term (doesn’t even sup­port back­ground images — IE7 comes out, which is an awe­some browser, and they decide it would be a good idea to force Word 2007 to be the ren­derer. Bril­liant.), thor­oughly mediocre RSS/feed-reading capa­bil­i­ties, and, to top it all off, it’s crap-slow (com­pared to ear­lier versions).

If it offers group­ware advan­tages I don’t know of them (but doubt it could, it’s always been fairly com­pre­hen­sive on that front), and chances are they won’t be par­tic­u­larly enabled until Server 2008 is released. Am guess­ing here, but not with­out some reasoning.

Avoid.

p.s. Yes, I’m prob­a­bly over­due for a Win­dows rein­stall.  Unfor­tu­nately a fairly major project cropped up just as I’d sched­uled one, and I still haven’t got around to it. Will prob­a­bly hunt down the right prod­uct key when the new CPU gets here early next week: that’s a large part of the prob­lem, Microsoft appar­ently expect that home users either buy pre­built sys­tems with stu­pid crapware-filled restore disks, or are hard­core tech using pirates/MSDN users (same thing… the users rarely paid for the MSDN subs, mostly its their work­place). I have 5 XP Pro licenses of dif­fer­ent vari­eties (not to men­tion pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Win­dows), and of those a bunch are the same prod­uct type (upgrade)… which makes license man­age­ment and com­pli­ance a bit of a challenge!

What I’d love MS to do is cre­ate a site-licensing prod­uct for SOHO users with flex­i­ble and trans­fer­able licens­ing at retail OEM pric­ing (that sounds dumb, but I mean still charg­ing what us mor­tals pay for OEM licenses, not the vol­ume prices that Dell, Lenovo, et al. get) — it’d be sim­ple, web admin­is­tered (not requir­ing a local server), and increas­ingly rel­e­vant in homes which are fea­tur­ing more and more computers.

# by Josh on November 1st, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 2 Comments »

So I succumbed to the allure of normality

That is, an inter­est­ing way of say­ing “I have a new phone that doesn’t require a con­certed weights train­ing regime for sev­eral months before you can begin car­ry­ing it around with you”.

Sony Ericsson V630i next to an iPaq

Noth­ing amaz­ing, it’s a fairly aver­age look­ing Sony Eric­s­son V630i. My ratio­nale in buy­ing it was that it’s not as though it’s part of the same busi­ness units as the DRM morons, any­way, and actively sub­verts their cause by offer­ing MP3 & WMA sup­port, instead of retarded ATRAC spe­cial­ness. It does use an M2 card instead of microSD, though, which is a bit of a shame.

Sony Ericsson V630i

Its PC Sync­ing is ade­quate, though obvi­ously not up to the Win­dows Mobile per­fec­tion to which I am accus­tomed :P

Mostly I just wanted PC sync­ing to make con­tact trans­fer pain­less. The “PDA” func­tion­al­ity (if one even dare call it that) is very much a sec­ondary thing: I’m vaguely con­sid­er­ing buy­ing a Palm, but not until I’ve got my head around this com­pletely. It’s rather on the usable side, but the inter­face is obvi­ously more lim­ited than a touch screen would ever be.

Sony Ericsson V630i

It cost me… noth­ing, on a Voda­fone con­tract. I didn’t mind that because I’m not locked into the hand­set for the con­tract length — I can unlock it from the Voda­fone net­work today if I want, with­out any charge, and stick my (3G, but, alas, I’ve only got par­tial 3G cov­er­age at my house — with both 3 and Vodafone/Optus, haven’t tested Tel­stra — so there’s not a great deal of UTMS going down here at the minute — reg­u­lar triband GSM wins out) SIM into any other phone.

Yes, that’s right, petty 3 users. I can change phones with­out hav­ing to go grov­el­ling to my net­work provider. Howdya­likethathuh? *gloats* :)

Any­way. It’s still good fun. It also has an MP3 player, but the probably-prohibitive cost of M2 media for this thing, com­bined with the supremely uncom­fort­able bun­dled head­phones (they’re designed for like, ele­phants or some­thing) and lack of reg­u­lar 3.5mm jack (*tear*) mean it’s not likely to get used much. ‘cept to say it sup­ports WMA & MP3 ring­tones, which is about as much fun as I had with the iPaq, only Win­dows Media Player actu­ally sup­ports this as a media device.

Yes, friends, that too is irony.


# by Josh on January 3rd, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 7 Comments »

PDAs are teh suck

Okay, I know I bought a PDA not a phone, but still. I’m pissed off. I went to UNSW end-of-semester party tonight and didn’t want to be car­ry­ing some­thing the size of a quarter-kilo slab of choco­late with me, so swapped SIMs with another phone and took it.

Point of irri­ta­tion #1: None of my con­tacts are stored on-SIM. There is no way to STORE con­tacts on SIM that I have yet dis­cov­ered, only to import them off it. Hence, hell will ensue if I ever decide to change hand­sets (as it did when I moved from a CDMA hand­set to a GSM one a few weeks back… this point is fresh in my mem­ory, and still rather painful).

Point of irri­ta­tion #2: Because I swapped the SIM out, I left the phone with the SIM socket read­ily acces­si­ble so I could eas­ily replace it when I got home. This meant leav­ing the bat­tery out. PDAs can sur­vive a few min­utes on resid­ual charge (backup batt?) some­how, but appar­ently leav­ing it alone for… three hours (? I wasn’t out long because I’m work­ing tomor­row and… well, a few rea­sons) means that it’s prone to nuk­ing every­thing in ROM/RAM/whatever the heck it stores its stu­pid infor­ma­tion in.

For­tu­nately I’m pretty good with my back­ups (2/6/6 was the last). But I still lost a hand­ful of cal­en­dar items, more than a few mes­sages, one or two con­tact additions/modifications, my lat­est email sync info, and, more sig­nif­i­cantly, Bejew­eled high scores. I know, I know. I nearly threw it into a wall when I dis­cov­ered this. But that would have been unkind to the wall.

# by Josh on June 9th, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
| 2 Comments »

Opera Mobile

Opera Mobile is wicked on my new Pocket PC. It’s actu­ally faster than IE seems to be, and I can use this beta for free until the end of the month!

The main attrac­tion is the way it lin­earises pages so well. I’ll seri­ously con­sider pay­ing for it once it comes out of beta…

Oh, and I thought I’d men­tion that this post is writ­ten in it using a super­cool 802.11b link! What with that and quad-band GSM/GPRS and Blue­tooth fly­ing around, can­cer can’t be too far off…

iPaq running Opera Beta

# by Josh on May 23rd, 2006 Tags: , ,
| 2 Comments »