Outlook 2010: The nightmare continues

As per a post­ing I made to the WSG list ear­lier this afternoon:

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

Fix Outlook 2010 website

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! :)

# by Josh on June 24th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
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Outlook 2007 again…

I’ve been doing the low-bandwidth mobile thing for the past two months due to travel and had accord­ingly been reserv­ing judg­ment JUST IN CASE that had any­thing at all to do with it. But it really doesn’t. Out­look 2007 is an absolute loser of a prod­uct. No other soft­ware on my com­puter is as vis­i­bly frus­trat­ing or unsta­ble. It’s being used with three POP accounts (all mostly well behaved) and one IMAP store (unmit­i­gated dis­as­ter) that work fine with other clients. This shouldn’t be so hard to get right. I don’t like hav­ing to use web­mail, though at least it’s very good webmail.

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?

# by Josh on August 21st, 2008 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Office 2007

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:

Outlook 2007 week calendars layered

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):

Firefox using the better part of 1GB of RAM

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:

Firebug in Net inspector action

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!

# by Josh on March 7th, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| 2 Comments »

1st ever Gmail spam?

In my account at least, I think.

Spam that snuck past Gmail's filtering using CSS positioning

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.)

# by Josh on January 31st, 2007 Tags: , ,
| 2 Comments »