waffle

So - on friday, Craig Eisler, the new General Manager of Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit, posts a post asking basically “I can’t detail when Office 2008 comes out, because we don’t know yet, and there’s a reason why we can’t say what features are in it, but what do you want to hear from me?”

68 comments later, Craig posts a new post, in which he mocks the two, in his opinion, worst comments, notices that a lot of people asked for Exchange support and says that they are “committed” to supporting Exchange. Okay. Right. Good. And by good, I mean: not totally tone-deaf.

But there’s a discrepancy here, upon which a few commenters expand: the people who ask for Exchange support aren’t exactly calmed by the words on Exchange. It is widely known what it has meant, previously, for Entourage and the Mac BU to be “committed” to Exchange - what the commenters wanted to hear was if support is getting significantly better - anywhere near feature parity with what Outlook does, because you’ll need binoculars to see feature parity from here. That wouldn’t be a hard thing to pre-announce, since it’s such a hard feature to cut that I suppose they’d rather postpone Office 2008 than cut it.

I want to quote one comment in particular, by a fellow named Sladuuch, since it highlights something important:

You indicate your understanding that we want more data and more transparency, and then you don’t give us any. Then you say that you appreciate the dialog. What dialog? All I see is you guys writing amusing anecdotes about your co-workers and how difficult yet rewarding your work is, while we yell and scream for full Exchange support. That’s hardly what I call a dialog.

Indeed.

Craig seems like a guy that’s got more of a clue and is less of a suit than most managers. He’s clearly passionate about Macs, and he seems passionate about his new team’s products as well. I’m going to offer a tip that he can use to redeem himself later: Apologize for Microsoft’s past behavior. Promise that you’ll do better. Actually deliver on that promise. Once major features land close enough to shipping, unveil them one by one on the Mac Mojo weblog, and have the engineers that worked on them do the explaining. This isn’t new and it’s not rocket science - it’s not even new for Microsoft, as several teams did it for Office 2007. It will go a long way to restoring the humanity in the process. Right now you’ve just got managers saying “no, we can’t show you that”.

There will always be people who hate on Microsoft, but there are also people who hate on the Mac BU specifically. Some of them are right, because it has almost always been a baby version of the Windows version with one or two features thrown in to be able to say that “we’re dedicated to the Mac”, rather than aiming for feature parity from the beginning and maybe missing a few features.

Those angry people in your comment threads… what do you suppose they’re going to like more? My Day or Exchange support?

If you give people a way to write public comments on your work, people will always hate on you, since you’re Microsoft. What you have to do is not to close down comments, not to ridicule comments, not to post less often - what you have to do is post more often, bring more actual meat to the table. That’s what going to ground the hecklers out. It’s what’s going to show you go to work, put in a solid 8 hours for two years and actually produce something you’re proud to show off. And if you’ll have to go into crunch time for a few months until you’re ready to present us with some new stuff, that’s fine too, and being honest about that on your weblog is great, but don’t leave on such a sour note.

I’ve developed a strategy for the past week about keeping NNW fast. I have on the order of 200 feeds, but it occured to me that I had to scroll an awful lot to find the feeds with new content, and that, given that many feeds don’t update that often, a refresh still takes a long time with a low bang-to-buck ratio. The solution is to make NNW stop checking feeds that don’t update that often. Here’s what I did (and I’m assuming you have evolved slightly from the protoplasm and are now using NNW 3):

• If you like me like to keep persistant data (previous news items) around, make a folder for abandoned feeds, if you haven’t already.
• From the View menu, sort your subscription list by “Attention”. (I did this previously, too.)
• Also from the View menu, Show Color Options… and set the “Not updated in 60 days” to a hideous color.
• Do a full refresh just to be sure.
• Grab all your old feeds (with that hideous color) and drag them to the Abandoned feeds folder. Close it. If you’re lucky, the folder will have sunk to the bottom of your list, representing that hopefully you weren’t paying the dead feeds attention.
• Select the folder, and bring up Get Info. Unfold the Refreshing section and set it to use a custom refreshing schedule. I used “every 40 hours”, and since I only manually refresh I set it to skip when manually refreshing.
• Continuously, when any feed turns that hideous color, throw it into the Abandoned feeds folder. When the Abandoned feeds folder does light up as having new news items, throw the feed back. (This is why I dislike deleting feeds directly.)
• When you have a spare hour left over, go through the feeds, hunt down their web sites and ensure your feed URL is up to date. (stevenf, I noticed, had stopped updating in mid-April, which was weird, but it turns out I used an old URL looking something like panic.com/~stevenf/mt/herebemonsters.rdf. Oh. And to think I almost missed this.)
• When Brent implements this magical next step, I’d like to tell you to adopt another color for really old stuff that you can semi-safely actually permanently delete, or at least set to NEVER refresh if you still like to maintain the news items in the database, but he hasn’t, so I won’t.

There’s a lot of people that thoroughly enjoy using Microsoft Entourage. Jaharmi, for example, argues that it comes close to fulfilling my requirements for the non-sucky mail client.

Here’s the deal, as far as I’m personally concerned. I like Microsoft Outlook. Really. Now, there’s a ton of things about it that I don’t like, like its track record as the world’s worst email client when it comes to security, or how, since it’s Microsoft, it forgoes useful use of Internet standards in favor of Microsoft standards so you can have the unbridled pleasure of buying a $1000+ Exchange Server once you’d like to share your calendar, or how, speaking of calendars, Outlook 2003 just won’t show multiple calendars as one with overlapping conflicts, or how it’s got more options than Wikipedia’s got in-universe descriptions of Star Trek episodes and characters (and the way the options are laid out, much like many Star Trek fans, can be used to scare small children). But I like the basic way most of the interface regarding email works. That’s why the reading pane is on my list.

Entourage has never landed there, in my opinion. It doesn’t quite feel like Outlook, it doesn’t quite feel like Apple Mail, it doesn’t feel like Mac OS 9 and it doesn’t feel like Mac OS X. It has an air of AppleWorks around it - a Mac OS 9 app turned into a Mac OS X app, old dressed in new, fitting nowhere. Instead of using WebKit (which, no, wasn’t released until 11 months before Entourage 2004 was released; far too late to trickle in) for rendering email messages, it uses its own engine. (I’m not sure what, but I wouldn’t bet against the late Mac/IE’s Tasman engine.) It has its own miniature window for entering addresses, and a button to open that window striped across all To/CC/BCC options. (Outlook, at least, has separate fields inline.) And, as is traditional for a Microsoft Mac product, its support for Microsoft’s own mystery meat standards is below that of the Windows counterpart (Entourage scores really low on this scale compared to other of Microsoft’s Mac offerings).

Entourage isn’t appealing to me. No, it’s not about not using Lucida Grande, it’s about feeling right. When I go Cmd+Ctrl+D and hover over a word, the dictionary panel doesn’t show up. When I go to use a contact in the system-wide — system-wide — address book, it’s not there, and I can only make it appear by synchronizing its own address book with the system-wide address book - a process that brings up a lot of dialog boxes and, for someone not using an LDAP server like the Active Directory server connected to an Exchange Server, is a complete waste of time.

There are many people that otherwise dislike Microsoft’s every offering, but like Entourage. I don’t question that they’re able to get work done in it, or that they truly like it, or even that some of them consider it unsurpassed. However, I’m not one of them. I dislike Entourage for being its own island in the netherworld between Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Windows, between Outlook, Eudora, Gmail and Apple Mail, and I particularly dislike how it both suffers from the usual Microsoft syndromes of not working with the system or like every other Mac-like app, and at the same time completely fails at working sensibly with Microsoft’s own horrible excuses for protocols.

I am not rooting against it; I’m hoping for a dramatic comeback and a great Entourage 2007. However, I’m also not terribly optimistic, because in my eyes, there’s just so much to be done that I’m not sure anything but a complete renovation would save the product.

Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was — indeed, is — one of the Universe’s very small number of immortal beings.

Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.

– Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the five-part Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, by Douglas Adams

The Accordion class creates a group of elements that are toggled when their handles are clicked. When one elements toggles in, the others toggles back.

The Accordion requires an XHTML doctype.

– Accordion.js, part of the mootools JavaScript framework, by Valerio Proietti and the mootools development team