We have a problem! Outlook 2010, according to Campaign Monitor, is going to continue to use the crippled MS Word layout engine. They adopted this as the status quo for Outlook 2007 and promptly set rich email with CSS, etc., back a number of years, and are showing no great sign of diverging from this path. However, there is hope! Campaign Monitor have started a website in conjunction with their “Email Standards Project” — essentially a standards advocacy website. They need your support now more than ever.

FixOutlook.org aims to collate the community’s discontent with this decision using Twitter to change Microsoft’s policy decision on this one before it’s too late and we’re stuck with yet another five-ten years of inferior email authoring!

If you’re a Twitter user, it’ll take two seconds to retweet and show your support.

Thanks!

Josh

This is a really important issue for anyone involved in email marketing, and well worth taking the effort to make some noise about. Essentially, if we don’t get off this track it’ll be years until it is possible to drop support for these inferior clients (as is the case with IE6, now) and we’ll all be dealing with sub-par mailing authoring, cross-compatibility, and display issues for a while to come.

Get tweeting! :)

These are the sort of niggly problems that make OS X look appealing… Mail.app is integrated with OS search and all that other stuff so nicely. Calendars and Contacts are no longer compellingly better on Outlook than elsewhere. In fact, between Sony Ericsson and Microsoft, various contacts in my phone managed to get junked because of character encoding issues — even when using a language installed on both phone and sync computer.

Email is a freakin’ ancient tech. Why can’t this just be straightforward, Microsoft?

Not to mention the OEM copy of XP MCE sitting in a draw that I’d lost track of (I think the system is now using a regular XP Pro license) or the miscellaneous systems that have affixed OEM licenses but for which there is no (misplaced) physical media.

Accordingly, if I want to obey the OEM sticker directive, I’ve got to download a CD ISO from a torrent site (because I don’t fork out for MSDN). But MSDN is increasingly attractive; it effectively offers the desired outcome. Unlicensed, unactivated systems that work perfectly well on a subscription basis… sure, subs suck, but whenever they stop their XP activation servers we’re all going to be screwed, anyway, so it hardly matters.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here making a list (on paper, which I’ll store with the physical media) of all the licenses in use, and roughly where. Thanks to the unauthorised rebuilding of systems that I own and have built from scratch so often (resourcefulness in anyone else’s book, evil work of a pirate to the draconian OEM overlords) whatever descriptions are attached to aforementioned systems is likely to be rendered completely untrue in eighteen months time when I once again get around to the wholesale slaughter rebuilding of them all. Intermittent reinstalls will probably happen, too, unless I’m driven so insane by the inability to discern one license from another I end up, as I do now, simply taking out the lot and shooting them all a new install.

To Microsoft: whatthehelldoyouwantmetodo? I am so not forking out the at-least-$2000 you would have me pay for retail Vista licenses for this lot–it’s that much because Vista Business retail licenses come in at a delicious $500 each. Say it with me: hell no. I’ve heard from a reliable system builder source that you’ve been telling them that the new OEM rules work in their favour as it’ll bring them more business. Sure, but it’s pretty crappy business if I don’t say so myself. I have absolutely no interest in becoming a Microsoft certified system anything, simply because it’d mean dealing with your crap in a professional capacity, and I deal with it quite enough in a professional capacity trying to do other sorts of development as my job, thankyouverymuch. I’m not going to pay a Microsoft tax twice (first for certification, second for individual licenses) just because you claim that your crappy system builders do it better than DIY-ers.

Whenever the time comes around to upgrade to Vista, if I ever deem it worthwhile on the other home desktops here not for any commercial pursuits (still running Business in response to the crippling networking capabilities of all Home line products), I’ll be making a trip to my local store, who, for what it’s worth, don’t even offer retail Vista Business for sale on their website, but mention the OEM edition an awful lot, with the token “(only sold w/ new system or to a system builder)” tacked on to placate anyone from officialdom who comes looking. I haven’t had the pleasure of breaking OEM conditions-of-sale (that’s all they are… are such things even legally enforcable in this country?!) just yet, but have no doubts there will be ample places that want to take my money when and/or if I do.

I’m actually in the position of having one spare XP license (two if you count XP MCE) at this point, but am sorely tempted to install Linux on at least one of the three systems I’m taking care of tonight just to avoid having to deal with these mediocre attempts at extortion in the future. It’s not morally defensible to refuse to acknowledge system builders as “original equipment manufacturers” when they are, in fact, conducting exactly the same tasks as their so-called ‘certified’ builders. Clearly, it’s not being pursued for retail sale: the only retail products that belong in an operating system product mix are upgrades for people who enjoy having computers that don’t work (i.e. most of the population, anyway).

It’s an indictment upon the difficulty of upgrading/reinstalling Windows that so few people take this route: quite frankly, the products don’t work. Everyone who is unqualified (in the literal, capable-of sense, not some arbitrary didacourse, paidMSsomemoney sense) to build a computer, in my experience, is unqualified to successfully install Windows independently. Even if they succeed at booting from a CD, negotiating the installer prompts (admittedly better than they used to be), manually answering questions about daylight savings and other such things that should long since have been dealt with automagically (c’mon, we’ve had GeoIP products for what, ten years now? Longer?), or at least correct from the outset (two HP machines last week were insistent the default timezone should be Singapore. They shipped in Australia. Is it so bloody hard to pick a populous east-coast state zone as the default?), chances of users correctly installing things such as drivers in post-install stages are slim to none. Nearly all phone a tech-saavy friend (I know no-one who’s ever called the Microsoft support line for OS installs… more should, but few do).

The point stands: retail licenses are for newbies, OEM licenses should be accessible to everyone who doesn’t give a crap about shiny packaging, manuals, and shooting their wallet to bits.

Here endeth the rant.

By vendor, that constitutes 176 crashes/hangs/‘not-respondings’ of Microsoft software to 21 of Adobe software over the same period. Now, it feels like I’m cheating the numbers here by reporting Windows Problem Reporting itself, because probably 90% of its crashes occur when reporting on Internet Explorer, but hey — these are the numbers Microsoft’s software itself gave me, so who’s complaining?

In case you think this isn’t a fair comparison for reasons of time spent using various programmes, exclude Problem Reporting crashes (though you shouldn’t) and the Microsoft stat comes down to 124. That is, lots.

I can’t think of a day since owning this computer I wouldn’t have used at least one piece of Adobe software, most commonly more. To be fair, Adobe software is more likely to do weird things (like, ya know, refusing to save) causing me to restart the application rather than letting it ‘crash’ per se… but Microsoft’s junk is vastly less likely to give me any sort of warning before flaking out.

These crashes are reported over a three-month period spanning November 26 until January 25.

Vista SP1 continues to be eagerly awaited.

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.

Especially do not do this and say that ‘it works fine for us’ to visiting developers!

I’m currently installing a wonderful free XPSP2 image with IE6 from the lovely folks at Microsoft’s IEBlog that actually works when testing webpages for legacy browsers. Please do this instead!

I am at the point where if this continues to prove ineffective I will be abandoning either WLS, Outlook, or both.

But for now I’m waiting for a rebuild and using Kerio’s excellent webmail product to conduct searches near-instantaneously and vastly more comprehensively than Microsoft’s obviously deficient search does.

These sorts of things really shouldn’t be possible in this day and age. Grumble grumble. I may need to (very reluctantly) stop sending email in UTF-8. UTF-8 should be mandatory, seriously.

And that’d be another geeky post. :|

The new version of Word is a thing of beauty. It just works, and makes sense, and is generally a usability wonder. I’m sure someone will publish a study to the contrary in the next week, but I don’t care — it is perfectly intuitive to a non-Office literate user. Yes, that is myself–I’ve battled with OO.org for years, and am utterly convinced it sucks. I have occasionally fought with MS Office products in this time, and battled slightly less, but still it’s felt like I’m doing things the slow way. Every essay I’ve written over the last eighteen months is stored in LyX (LaTeX) format: I’ve basically not used a word processor for anything serious in at least that long. And I haven’t used a Microsoft word processor at home for three years (on a horrible laptop), and not on my primary desktop computer for four, or possibly five. Historical perspective: I started using Windows when I was 7, stopped when I was 15 or 16, and returned at 18 ½ — Microsoft have got good reason to be trying to bring me back into the family, because I’ve been away for a long time.

I am as upset as the next web developer about the Outlook team’s brain-dead decision to switch back to Word as the primary rich email rendering engine, but will wax lyrical about the new calendaring features in Outlook!! For they are greatly beautiful. Observe my three calendars (Organised into: Personal & Work; Uni; Church) layered together here:

Groove makes me shrug enormously, it does nothing useful for me. Unless it’s like Sharepoint only… good. But even then, I’ve never dug that whole Intranet collaborative thang. Really, if I were going to run bloat-inducing collaborative software, I should start with Adobe’s Version Cue. But I don’t use it because… too many apps in my tray annoys me, and Firefox eats all my memory as is (screeny from yesterday… it peaked at about 1GB but I couldn’t be bothered taking another):

The only reason I still use that bloody browser is its extensions support: Firebug has stolen my heart where Office 2007 hasn’t yet. Here’s its asset download graphy thingamijig:

It’s even better than Chris Pederick’s toolbar. But oh how I’d love to switch to Opera (or even, shock, IE) full time now. Firefox really isn’t doing it for me with its bloat these days.

Speaking of bloat, Office 2007 is one 500MB download. It doesn’t download a 500MB stub and then install the rest — no, that includes Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, Publisher, … and all the other random crap I installed but will probably never use. Fantastic.

Everything is pretty fast (but it emphatically encourages you to install Windows Live Desktop, and seeing as I’m a beta tester for other Live stuff pretty willingly, I figured I may as well, and when you first install that indexing makes everything chug) which is excellent — but I’m still looking to buy a new dual core 939 sometime soon. Graphics are fine because I have no intention of upgrading to Vista (read: needing DirectX 10 and a $1000 graphics card) in the next 18 months at least, but… well, another 2GB of RAM would go down nicely. Shame it’s still relatively expensive, though.

Microsoft, I wasn’t going to pirate your software because it’s not that good, but thanks for the discount, anyway!

Note that it displays perfectly and sans any word obfuscation/misspelling as is usual for these things — though I would hasten to add that anyone that follows up aforementioned spam is unlikely to have intelligence enough to avoid something with shifty spelling.

It’s achieved by embedding arbitrary characters in the middle of a word in a span element, and then floating these to the right. It’s only a two-part division at this stage, so it’s fairly trivial to break up keywords into their component parts and match either side of spans occurring in the middle of a word — hardly common in respectable markup. Even if there were more divisions, the fact that they occur without even a space either side of the element should be a giveaway.

The other notable feature is the inversion of “web!master at example dot org (remove the exclamation mark)” concept — here, they’re using it to avoid immediate blacklisting based on a reported domain.

This will in all probability be dealt with soon by people who know far more about it than I, but I thought it an interesting enough development to be worth mention, particularly in a “explaining the absurdity of their markup” sense — this constitutes, for anyone significant who reads this, absolutely no reason for reconsidering the (limited) CSS given to campaign authors as it is best dealt with at a markup level alone.

In terms of minimal impact to legitimate email, this is the only way forward — contrary to what Microsoft might have you believe with their recent brain-deadness concerning Outlook 2007’s rendering engine. (Though we’re all still guessing at the reasoning behind this, and I’m falling closer to the anti-trust separation theory than anything related to security/spam prevention, etc.)

When they announced it a whole bunch of people were getting a little grumpy about how it didn’t work with Windows update — a few of the same were getting grumpy about how Microsoft didn’t release a version for Linux, but no further comment required on them… you’re all of an intelligent enough bunch to realise aforementioned people fall into the category of … well, you know.

Obviously, it’s no big deal — the whole point of that image it is that it hasn’t (and won’t) update, allowing you to keep testing on older platforms.

But then, this afternoon, I go and shut down the image (I know, suspending is faster, but I was trying something different) and all of a sudden it goes and says it’s installing 7 updates before it shuts down. In usual XP fashion.

So what gives?

I found myself yelling at it “you’re not even a real operating system! Don’t you get it? You’re going to be used and trashed in a couple of months anyway! Why do you care if you’re virus and spyware ridden by the end of it?” Possibly a strange response, but there we go.

Got me thinking about (human) clones, actually. Much musing to be had there. Maybe I’m just strange…

More significantly, though, is Windows Media Player 11. It’s got a new interface, plenty of usability tweaks, a bunch of music store enhancements (eugh, sorry, I can’t be positive about this one) — notably URGE — and probably more DRM to go along with it, and an even-better-than-version-10 CD-ripping interface.

It’s designed as a one-click process, but makes selection of format, bitrate, etc. completely quick, easy, and painless.

It’s great.

My only qualm is that it’s impossible to select any other format than the ones originally presented. Sure, this is a Microsoft product and it’s targeted at computer-illiterate types the world over and having an “add your own command-line encoding option” option probably isn’t great from a usability for all perspective, but what’s wrong with having the option there? I’m not going to rip my music in a DRM format, ever.¹ It’s just not going to happen. I’ll sooner be stuck listening to CDs and scratching them to death and then buying new ones. You already give me the option to rip an MP3, so why not other formats you can’t control?

The only reason I can come up with is that other, competing, formats are technically superior. You feel threatened by FLAC (were it to become widely adopted) as it is superior to WM Lossless… probably because it lacks DRM. Justifiably, you don’t feel so threatened by MP3 as it is, in general, inferior in every way (except it lacks DRM) — even though it has massive penetration.

Even that penetration is slipping because people don’t change defaults and are ripping their music using Windows Media Player or iTunes. So, you know, there’s less to be lost by letting the geeks play with their zany open source formats. The proles will never actually know or care enough to embrace them, you keep your control, and an underclass (or silent ruling class?) benefits and is endeared towards your brand. And, of course, geeks are vocal about products: I love Windows Media Player 11, but this little thing really gets to me. If you give me that, then I will be so happy with it I’ll be constantly trying to convert iTunes users — admittedly, I’ll probably fail because their collections are under proprietary lock and key and their hardware has bound them to it, but in a couple of years when their iPod batteries die they’ll see the error of their ways.

Geeks will too readily prostitute themselves and become product evangelists — but, beware, we are notoriously given to infidelity.

1. I will, however, rip my music in non-rights manage formats and let software convert it as necessary for playback on retarded hardware devices. I haven’t required hardware that has such draconian requirements yet, but if I ever do, this will be the closest I get to compromising.

Why not just wear a t-shirt saying “I’m an ignoramus”?

Clearly, your business depends on it, clearly, it’s coming soon, clearly… you did nothing. Oh, yeah, that’s Redmond’s fault.

I’m really appreciating a lot that Microsoft are doing of late, so, without wanting to sound like too much of a fanboy, let me just remark that this person had it coming and any issues faced are entirely their own problem and responsibility. Moron.

Via a ZDNet blog via Slashdot

See also my angry post from last week about copyright and digital media in Australia.

Even if you’re not a geek this STILL AFFECTS YOU. Own an iPod or any other MP3 player? Have iTunes on your computer?

How on earth they’re ever going to transform endless promotion into financial return is beyond me… but hey, I hear they’ve bought an Xbox hot air balloon, so at least they’re in good money-losing company. (Microsoft’s Xbox division, for those not in the loop, is more commonly known as the 4-billion-and-increasing-dollar-hole.)