Outlook is a Microsoft product. Hotmail is a Microsoft product.
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. :|
Please stop me if I am making a fool of myself by overflowing with gushing praise for this thing, but, seriously, the best $75 I ever spent on software. (Yes, you can get the latest Office Ultimate for $75 if you’re a student. Legit.)
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!
In my account at least, I think.
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.)
I said yesterday that I’m a fan of what Microsoft have been doing of late and Slashdotters are idiots. One reason for that is IE7, as that post discussed, but in terms of what other things Microsoft have been doing I didn’t really mention anything. Well, one new Microsoft product that does immensely sensible things is Live Messenger 8.1 Beta (see, I didn’t call it MSN anymore!) which finally lets you appear offline and continue conversations without having to close windows… it’s a polish release, and feels good.
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.
So it’s been delayed in Japan because of unspecified issues (probably to do with localisation) and Slashdot comments are an absolute moron-fest. There are way too many people in there caught completely by surprise by this thing, including one who ironically says “Thanks Redmond” after IE7 broke their business’ online payment system.
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.
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