It beggars belief...

Dumb bug of the week

Outlook is still a thing?

It sure is. Although it’s clunky, I’m not aware of any practical replacement for it.

I’m not aware of any practical replacement for it.

What is it for? I don’t have it, and not knowing what it even is, I’m not missing it, whatever it is…

What is it for?

Well for enterprise MS Office users it’s the client end of the MS Exchange mail setup.
You’re missing it like a hole in the head.

To describe it in a bit more detail, it’s a system for managing communication within a business. It acts as an email client, but also has shared calendaring, tasks and to-do lists, notes and other stuff that I’ve never used.

At work we use it to set up meetings (tell it I need to meet with Andy, Bob, James and optionally Sarah as soon as possible and it’ll return with something like “you can do that at 2:30 in meeting room 4”). We have shared vehicles in there so that we can book them out. It reminds you about your meetings and tasks, and gives an overview of your day/week.

There are certainly standalone apps that handle these sorts of things individually, but I’m not aware of anything else that’s integrated to this extent (although Lotus Notes might be, if it still exists – I’d forgotten about it when I made my earlier post). As I noted above, it’s a bit clunky and hard to use, but once you get the hang of it then it’s not terrible.

I think I probably had it as my email client when I was working at ARM, actually. But I never used anything but the email. Other folk probably did.

It reminds you about your meetings and tasks, and gives an overview of your day/week.

day/week/month

As I noted above, it’s a bit clunky and hard to use, but once you get the hang of it then it’s not terrible.

Damn near impossible to use without top posting¹, quoting levels? ROFL, defaults to sending HTML², has a UI that changes with each version with the clear aim of hiding useful features

¹Which actually comes in handy when an argumentative dipstick has left in all the earlier content that proves the opposite of what they are currently claiming.
That said I don’t think catching out bad liars is a feature MS highlight.

defaults to sending HTML

File/Options/Mail/Compose messages in this format. Change to suit your preference.

(I haven’t actually tested it but I assume that it works!)

Of course people can’t manage to read that without the dopey graphic, can they? Grump, grump.

The stupidity level of some people can be astonishing.

Today I saw a girl on the production line scooping up spilt chocolate powder. This is normal, big heaps get spilled when making stuff, so if it is just a pile of powder it is recovered and put back into the opened chocolate powder bag.

What isn’t so normal is that the receptacle she was using to collect the powder in was the big mesh strainer (about the size of an LP). The one that is used to filter the chocolate powder so it makes an even coating on the product and not the clump that it would otherwise be. Seeing as she had earlier done exactly that, it wasn’t as if she could claim not to know what would happen when she put the powder into the strainer.

Yes. Seriously. Her movements caused the powder to filter through. So you could trace her movements simply by looking for the trail of powder on the floor. The powder recovered? Not so much…

Kinda makes you wonder – does it hurt to be that stupid?

Damn near impossible to use without top posting1, quoting levels? ROFL, defaults to sending HTML, has a UI that changes with each version with the clear aim of hiding useful features

Sounds like the default email client in Android was written by the same people. If you manage to get it to stop sending HTML messages, it will instead bloat them out and make them unreadable by changing plain text to base64. Quoting is a mess. Top posting is standard (indeed when I write longer more involved messages I use the iPad because that understands the concept of in-line quoting). And while behaviour is broadly similar, the UI changes with each release because, hey, Android changes it’s UI every version too. They seem currently in the let’s-copy-Apple-and-have-big-expanses-of-white mode, which is terrible for two reasons. The first is battery efficiency (as more phones are OLED or AMOLED, white screens take more power than black ones) and secondly it’s really awful at night. Oddly enough, for all the money and resources and special-geek-power that Google claim to command, it is apparently still too difficult for them to manage to create a “night mode” (that’s a dark theme, not blue filter). :-/

(that’s a dark theme, not blue filter).

Because my phone uses TouchWiz, I’ve been able to sort-of do this, in a somewhat ass-backwards way.
[works on an S7, probably the same for S8 and the Edge variants]

• Settings → Themes → Themes → “Material_Black” (free) → Install

• The icons supplied with that theme suck really hard, so…
  Settings → Themes → Icons → Tap on Default to restore default icons.

• Settings → Wallpaper → then reapply the lock screen wallpaper (Tokyo Tower) and the home screen (cherry blossom, Meguro River, night).

Now I have the phone looking like it used to, only the Gallery, Calculator, My Files, Contacts, etc (the System stuff) now has BLACK backgrounds instead of white. Unfortunately this doesn’t extend to the email client, but it’s a lot better than it was.

However, there’s a hack! Settings → Accessibility → Direct access.
Turn it on, then select the “Negative colours” option. Now if you’re faced with a screenful of white when reading in the middle of the night with the lights out (or is that just me that can’t sleep?), press the home button quickly three times and it’ll flip the colours. Okay, red becomes blue and green becomes magenta – but more importantly white becomes black. Perfect for taming all that white.

PS: To restore if you want it back as it was: Settings → Themes → Themes and you will see “My themes” at the top has, as its leftmost entry, a dark looking theme with a big blue swish and the clock in the upper middle reading “12:45”. That’s the DEFAULT theme (not that the selector bothers to mention the theme names). Apply that, it’ll reset the theming, icons, and visual stuff to the way it was when you first powered up the phone.
Everything throws away custom wallpaper, so if you had photos you liked, you’ll need to re-apply them afterwards.

Which actually comes in handy when an argumentative dipstick has left in all the earlier content that proves the opposite of what they are currently claiming. That said I don’t think catching out bad liars is a feature MS highlight.

Reminds me of an email from a customer recently. Trying to claim that he never received notification of a payment that was due. How dare we cut off his service due to non-payment when we hadn’t advised him what he owed, etc. The only mistake he made was that he was replying to the invoice email that he hadn’t received…

And have you seen how Outlook handles threading? It doesn’t do very well at all. All it can do is group messages within the thread, not display them in a response tree like Pluto or Messenger does, so there’s no way to see who is replying to who. An ugly useless mess.