03 January 2008
Cursor*10 Flash game
This is some seriously clever stuff and I encourage all of you to try it. It took me 3 tries to finally get but that was under 10 minutes.
Labels: games
02 January 2008
Outlook UI Annoyances vol. 1: Unread Items
Like many "knowledge workers" in the world I am chained to the Microsoft Outlook at work for my email and calendaring purposes. My own personal thoughts on email as a collaboration tool aside [that's for another day and perhaps its own startup] there's somethings about it that drive me absolutely batty. Today's annoyance:
There's so many things wrong with this that it's not even funny. In Outlook the following things count as "Unread Mail":
This is only what appears as the number of unread messages in Outlook's folder list. As far as deleted items go, I can almost understand where they were coming from with this one. A user might have accidentally "missed" the item they were trying to delete or got a little too aggressive with the Delete key.*
Being used to Apple Mail and Thunderbird this one spooks me out a lot. The items that appear in the Unread Mail view are never updated until you manually refresh by viewing something else. Mail and Thunderbird both do this with things that you read and leave in your inbox but not with filed or deleted mail. So in Outlook if you read a message and delete it it stays in your unread folder. If you read a message and file it in another folder it stays in your unread messages folder. It's like they want you to navigate around the product or something.
In something that I can't tell if it's ironic or not if you have an empty mailbox selected and mail comes into it it will mark it as read because it autoselects it. This can be solved by turning off "mark as read after X time" function but I don't know how you could live without that [set to 0 seconds]. I certainly can't.
*Another annoyance is Microsoft's hatred of the backspace key being used to delete anything that's not text and instead having it actually navigate away from what you're looking at.
Notification of unread items
There's so many things wrong with this that it's not even funny. In Outlook the following things count as "Unread Mail":
- Deleted mail you haven't "read", including ones that you use the pop-up notifications to resolve
- auto-saved drafts of mail messages that are still being composed
This is only what appears as the number of unread messages in Outlook's folder list. As far as deleted items go, I can almost understand where they were coming from with this one. A user might have accidentally "missed" the item they were trying to delete or got a little too aggressive with the Delete key.*
The "Unread Mail" folder itself
Being used to Apple Mail and Thunderbird this one spooks me out a lot. The items that appear in the Unread Mail view are never updated until you manually refresh by viewing something else. Mail and Thunderbird both do this with things that you read and leave in your inbox but not with filed or deleted mail. So in Outlook if you read a message and delete it it stays in your unread folder. If you read a message and file it in another folder it stays in your unread messages folder. It's like they want you to navigate around the product or something.
In something that I can't tell if it's ironic or not if you have an empty mailbox selected and mail comes into it it will mark it as read because it autoselects it. This can be solved by turning off "mark as read after X time" function but I don't know how you could live without that [set to 0 seconds]. I certainly can't.
*Another annoyance is Microsoft's hatred of the backspace key being used to delete anything that's not text and instead having it actually navigate away from what you're looking at.
01 January 2008
New Years' Resolution
Post to blog at least twice a week for six months.
Labels: meta
