But at least the interface is pretty
November 12, 2007
I get email, lots of it. Chopping through the uncontrolled undergrowth in my inbox, Outlook informs me that I have 224 unread messages. They’re probably mostly spam but I’d like to flip through them anyway. So I set up a “Read” column icon in the message sorting pane and clicked on it.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Hey Micro$oft, do you think you could pull a couple young geniuses off the program to innovationalize transparent animated title bar interfaces, and get them to fix basic functionality?
Wow, that’s so blatantly stupid I had to try for myself. Sure enough it won’t let you sort. I really find myself lost for words in trying to describe the stupidity of this move.
Sorting by a boolean field would be a really tough programming job. I mean you would have to write maybe 4-10 lines of code—writing that dialog probably only took one line of code. Come on, give the MS guys a break. They’ve been working so hard on security and arithmetic that they can’t be expected to do high level programming like this. Also, it’s a general rule that the number of bugs is proportional to the number of lines of code, so really they’re reducing the possibility of bugs.
ROFL Lucas!!
I don’t know what version of Outlook you have, but mine has “Unread Mail” under the “Favorite Folders” Filter. Once in that view all the columns work (to do basic sorting operations). Doesn’t the Pareto Principle apply here?
Why, so it does! But I didn’t happen to have my window set up that way. Still, having used M$ products for as long as I have, I should have thought they’d have a roundabout, bass-ackwards, overthought solution to sorting, while making it possible to set up a column that doesn’t do anything.
I’d love to hear the committee meeting at M$ that led to this: “Let’s make the user go hunting for a special-purpose folder, in effect an entirely different method of sorting for just that one variable, while disabling the most obvious method.”
Every other email client I’ve used – and for a while I made quite a hobby of trying different ones – was able to accomplish this sort just by clicking on the appropriate column.
Oh come now. The most obvious method for you may not be the most obvious for the task based workers of the world. I know that my first thought as a non IT luddite would be: Huh? There’s a way to add columns? What are columns? And if I click on them they sort? Field Chooser? That’s intuitive as heck! Holy cow! There’s a field where I can toggle the little envelope to open and close by marking it “unread”!
With M$ products, it’s all about making it easy for the person that doesn’t care what the heck a field chooser is. But more importantly, we’d like you to never count your licenses either. Just buy some more next year.
<blockquote>With M$ products, it’s all about</blockquote
…adding functionality on top of functionality until the code is over bloated beyond belief.
…charging customers for crappy buggy software that doesn’t just work, without a consistent reboot or indistinguishable error.
…using monopolized power to steal ideas and/or screw up the implementation.
And the list goes on…
You’ll get no argument from me on that point. But every other field allows sorting, just not that one. I think they actually had to write extra code to remove a feature that is common to all the other major email clients. Because, just to have an “Unread” folder, the sorting algorithm has to be buried in there somewhere in the first place.
M$ is a constant source of wonder (and employment) to me.
I just switched to Mozilla Thunderbird. I don’t know if you can set it up to do a “read” sort, but I like it much better than Outlook.
And oh –
Do you know that you don’t have an RSS feed? And if you do know it, then why don’t you have one? And if you didn’t know it, do you think you could put one in?
If you use Google Reader you can get a feed by clicking on “Add Subscription” and then type in the website for whatever feed you want. Google automatically finds the feed and adds it for you.
Otherwise, try this for the feed:
DecrepitOldFool RSS
Right click and copy, then paste into your RSS Feeder.
Kay, you are so right – Thunderbird is great! Alas, the college where I work is pretty much Outlook-land. So I’m stuck with it or I’d do everything in gMail.
Thanks Webs. That same URL also makes a nifty live bookmark in Firefox. Hope that helps.
That worked. Thanks. I use Thunderbird as my feedreader too.