So there you go. Mentioned.

I also recently wrote an article for another website about my experiences building Secret. It’s currently their “Featured App”, so take a look.

Hope you are all well.

I was surprised to see this:

Lots!  Hilarious.

I did a quick experiment, and it seems that once you get past 60 attachments in an email, the display shows “lots”.  It seems to occur in Snow Leopard and Leopard, so maybe this has been around for a long time – it is rare to get so many attachments in one email, so I’m not surprised I hadn’t seen this before.

Apple has even internationalised this – so in Japanese, for example, you get:

That’s Apple sweating the details – unlike certain other companies we know.

Not sure why they chose 60 as the cut-off point (or why they had to have a cut-off point). I would have thought they’d have gone for 64, and that was what I was expecting as I added more and more items to a draft email to test. But still, it was funny and brought a smile to my face this morning.

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!

“Faster simpler”? What does that mean? Did they possibly mean “Faster, simpler”? And given the other sentences ended with correct punctuation, shouldn’t that one end with a full stop?

Not to mention the large 7 is a different font than the 7 in the actual logo at the bottom?

It’s just lazy, like everything Microsoft does. Their ads have as much attention to detail as their operating system. No need to click the “Experience now” button – I think that ad tells you exactly what to expect.

This one ad, taking pride of place on Microsoft’s front page, is a showcase for just some of what is wrong with Microsoft.

First, the obvious thing is Microsoft desperately wants to be cool. So desperately. You can smell the desperation.

I can tell you now, using “pretty dope” on your website does not make you cool. In fact, this ad reminds me of some teenager’s father trying to act cool with his teenage son’s friends as they leave to go out partying on a Saturday night:

“Homies…that car is the shizzle! You dudes are dope!!! Where da bitches at tonight? Yo?” (flicks fingers in an attempt to make some cool gang sign he saw on Law and Order).

Mentioning “Twitter” does not make you cool either. You can’t just throw around the latest trends – It makes you look like a try hard.

But there is more. There is always more.

“More reviews”? Was that a review? Well, I guess it was. Just not a particularly good one. A random tweet from a random anonymous user with a one line comment. That’s the quality I’m looking for in a review about an OS that I’m about to drop AU$200 or more on.

But the quality of the copy is nothing compared to the details. Take a look to the right of the ad. We have a number of buttons:

So what’s wrong? Well, first we have different size buttons. This is sloppy when the buttons are all left aligned and not vastly different in text length or position, and even if you argue it is because the text is shorter in some, then you’ll notice inconsistent spacing (between the last letter and the arrow), so that argument doesn’t explain the size variations. And finally, inconsistent capitalisation (“Learn More” versus “Find out more”) – I mean, that is beyond sloppy.

It’s all part of the Microsoft experience – sloppy and inconsistent. Don’t forget this is on the front page of a multi-billion dollar company with an advertising budget of 1.4 billion dollars in 2009 – almost 3 times the budget of Apple in that same year! Compare their ads. Compare their websites!

It’s about sweating the details. It is why Apple’s software is a superior experience to Microsoft’s. It is why the iPhone blows away Windows Mobile. Microsoft still doesn’t get it.

If you are reading this and you still don’t get why those buttons are bad, you see nothing wrong with the ad text, and you can’t smell that desperation, you probably deserve to be using Windows. I can offer you no more.

Do you think Apple create their legendary interfaces based solely on user input? Even Microsoft are smart enough to not do that.

However, I’ve noticed the following Windows 7 ads on the internet:

I give you, the OS built for Homer. :-)

This week Apple released iWork ’09, which contains Numbers ’09. For completeness I thought I should do the same comparison again, to see how Numbers now stacks up.

The Numbers

Here is a link to the spreadsheet in Numbers ’09 format (zipped), and a PDF Version.

And here is a summary table:

As you can see, things have improved a lot in terms of coverage of Excel functionality. In particular, there are big increases in Statistics and Engineering functions. Almost 100 new functions were added in the new release.

What does that mean for those coming from Excel, or trying to import Excel spreadsheets? Well, Apple seem to have covered most of the common functionality. The numbers above are misleading, and look like Apple haven’t – but when you take, as an example, Engineering functions, you find that most of the missing functionality is around complex numbers. I doubt anyone reading this blog has a spreadsheet that does complex number calculations. Similarly database functions – their use is pretty obscure.

There are possibly some stats and finance functions that will break Excel import, so if you rely heavily on these you should check the list.

So, as I mentioned, that is a big increase in functions. Still, I’m disappointed Apple didn’t try and match Excels functions totally (maybe not Database Functions), and then start to add some of their own. The compatibility argument would have been a lot strong if they had, and some of the functions would have been pretty easy to add (ISNUMBER anyone?)

So is Numbers any good?

Yes. I use it daily, and it is much easier to use than Excel, the results look better, and it has some great functionality such as table categories and intelligent tables – in comparison Excel is just a big boring grid with some functions behind cells.

Being able to put small individual tables on a single page is the real advantage of Numbers, and the end results are spreadsheets that actually look great, communicate better and are easier to manipulate. Numbers is a pleasure to use for the most part.

You can export to Excel format, though it is always disappointing as Excel spreadsheets are so damn ugly. The iPhone also can view Numbers documents (as it can Excel). If you are on Windows of course, you can’t view Numbers documents. But who actually chooses to use Windows these days?!

Here’s my first screen of icons:

Note Mail, Contacts, Phone, Notes, etc. And here is my second.

Mainly games and trivial things that I’ll probably delete by the end of the week.

So, see the mullet? It’s all “business up front, party in the back“.

You probably wish you hadn’t come back to my site after reading that, but thank you anyway.

So anyway, I’m out visiting a business partner, and in the foyer of their building they had one of those touch screen directory displays. The type where you put in the first letter of the company you are looking for, and then select the entry you want and it gives you all their business information.

I took some photos of it with my phone, so the quality is poor. But anyway, it looked like this:

And at the bottom are these funky up down buttons for moving back and forth between pages.

So anyway, I thought I’d test the software a little – hey, it’s a hobby. What happens if I go backwards on page 1?

Oh no they didn’t? Oh yes they did! So I went back a few more pages.

I considered going all the way back to see if I could crash the software when it reached some type size limit, but there was a guy behind me wanting to use the device.

Anyway, the company wasn’t even listed. But they were in the building. So not only is the software untested (and full of the most basic of edge case bugs), it doesn’t get updated very often either.

Lazy developers. Crap software. Probably Windows developers.

At least, that was the way the world was moving. Until Outlook 2007.

I use OS X Leopard in a business environment. And I choose to use Apple’s Mail client (called simply “Mail“). To be honest, Mail in Tiger (the previous version of OS X) was good, but lacked a lot of the integration that existed in something like Outlook 2003. With Leopard, it appears that while Apple was leap-frogging Outlook, Microsoft were moving Outlook backwards so that Apple didn’t need to jump so far. Apple produced a superior product. Microsoft produced a product setting email clients back years.

HTML Mail

There is this thing called standards. And there is also this thing called “modern” standards. Apparently, when Microsoft produced Outlook 2007, they decided to use Word’s HTML renderer rather than Internet Explorer’s (not that Internet Explorer is known for being overly standard compliant). The Word HTML renderer is years old, and does not follow modern standards. What this means is that Outlook 2007 users now have a mail client which incorrectly renders HTML mail.

I’m not a believer in sending HTML mail for all mail – I send most of my emails in plain text. But there is a time and place for everything. Sometimes you might want to send out an email that looks a little nicer – it could be some photos you want to show off, a business letter with a particular logo for a special purpose, or maybe just an invitation to clients that you wanted to impress.

And it is with the latter where I encountered my first Outlook 2007 problems.

After sending out an invitation from my company, a colleague came to me and told me that he couldn’t read the text in the mail. Apparently it was all black. I pointed out I had sent standard HTML, and asked what client he was using. It was Outlook 2007.

Everyone else could view the mail – though most were using OS X Leopard, so that wasn’t surprising. However, one person was using Outlook 2003, and it rendered fine. Another was using Thunderbird. So I needed to do some research, and discovered the Outlook 2007 HTML rendering problem.

To see how much of a problem this is I created some HTML mail and sent it to a friend. It was a complex looking mail that uses Leopard Mail’s stationery (and was trivial to create I might add). It included fancy photos, background images, and a central text area for the body of the mail. Here is the mail as it appears in Mail (click to enlarge).

HTML Mail in Apple Mail

As you can see, the mail looks pretty good – it is clear, it is artistic, it is creative. But I stress – it’s standard HTML. Any modern browser can view that HTML. There is nothing “Mac specific” – whatever that means.

Now, let’s compare this to how this mail looks in Thunderbird and Outlook 2003 (click to enlarge).

Thunderbird HTML Mail

Outlook 2003 HTML Mail

That looks pretty good – they both did a great job. Now lets compare with Outlook 2007 (Click to enlarge).

HTML Mail in Outlook 2007

That’s a complete balls up. Imagine if the background had been dark – you wouldn’t even see the body text. That was what happened with the invite I mentioned earlier.

And the most amazing thing is that the older version of Outlook rendered the mail correctly!

Inline Images

Ok, so Outlook 2007 is bad with HTML. What about general mail you’d send in a business environment?

Recently I sent some mail to another company. It was a bug report – straight text, with some inline images pointing out the problems I’d found. The people I’ve worked with have been doing this for years – text mail with inline images is an essential part of doing business over email.

Here’s an example of me sending some mail with inline images. First, on Leopard’s Mail (click to enlarge):

Text Mail with Images in Apple Mail

As you’d expect, Thunderbird and Outlook 2003 can render this mail correctly. Certainly Apple Mail handles inline images a little better by making them look like part of the mail, but it is still very readable and easy to access.

Thunderbird Text Mail

Outlook 2003 Text Mail

What about Outlook 2007? Surely Microsoft couldn’t get this wrong?

Well apparently, yes they can.

Text Mail with Images in Outlook 2007

Mail sends the mail as multipart mime. That’s to be expected. Alternating text and images.

Outlook 2007 takes the first bit of text, puts that as the body, and then adds as attachments each image, and each following piece of text between images as a separate attachment. Basically, the mail is unreadable – you have to pull out each of those ATT*.txt files. As you might have guessed, the person I sent the original mail to asked me to send them something they could easily read.

Conclusions

At best, Microsoft look to be incompetent – surely they test their email client with other email clients? At worst, Microsoft have purposely crippled their email client, ensuring people don’t switch to an alternative email client as they can’t be sure email will look the same when it reaches those using Outlook 2007.

What can you do here? Well, you could avoid Outlook 2007 until Microsoft fix it. If you are the administrator of Windows machines at your company, don’t let your staff upgrade. Move them to Thunderbird perhaps.

If you really must send Outlook 2007 friendly mail, your best bet is to convert your message to PDF, and send the PDF. Not exactly convenient I know.

But I personally think we should send out even more HTML mail. If Microsoft don’t want to follow standards, make them follow standards. If you are on a Mac, send lots of stationery based mail to your friends. If they tell you they can’t read it, tell them it is Outlook 2007, and if they want to participate in the modern world of email, they’ll need to use a modern email client. Microsoft don’t have the power they once had, regardless of their market share. It’s a brave new world.

I figured the best way to do this was to list all the functions in Excel, and highlight the ones that are not supported in Numbers. Sounds like an ideal use of a spreadsheet – so I prepared the list in Numbers itself. I also wrote a few notes on functions where I found they differ slightly from Excel (I blogged about some of these differences here).

So, first the results.

Functions in Excel versus Functions in Numbers

Here is a link to the spreadsheet in Numbers format (zipped), and a PDF version.

And here is a summary table:

As you can see, Numbers has roughly half the number of functions as Microsoft Excel. It isn’t quite as bad as it sounds though. Some key points from my research:

Text Functions: Almost all functions in Excel are available in Numbers – the exceptions being TEXT and the double byte character functions that are only available in Japanese Excel. Japanese users might be distressed by this however.

Date and Time Functions: The missing functions tend to be more obscure or those that may not be consistent across platforms such as DATEVALUE.

Mathematical Functions: The missing functions are Array and Matrices related and a few more obscure functions.

Financial and Statistical Functions: This may be the killer for many users – only around half of these functions in Excel are in Numbers.

Other Functions: There are no Engineering or Database functions in Numbers at all. If you use any of them, you’re out of luck.

Check the actual spreadsheet to see if there is something you think you need that Numbers won’t cover.

Using Numbers

Now that I’ve used Numbers a bit more, I should make some observations.

First, it is very slow on my G5 iMac (2GHz, 1GB). It is much smoother with an Intel machine, and more memory (of course). But Excel on the same hardware is a speed demon.

Unless I’m missing something, you can only print one sheet at a time. This is very annoying. If you Export instead to PDF, it can only print all sheets with one sheet per page, so that isn’t a substitute for sheets that span more than one page.

It is really nice not having to mess with tables in order to add explanation text or headings. Once you get used to doing it that way, you don’t want to go back to Excel. Ever.

I’d like to see more functions – I tried importing some spreadsheets I’ve used for years and found they import fine, but have some warnings on some very trivial functions (like ISNUMBER) that don’t exist in Numbers. I’d like to see Apple expanding the Excel compatibility (and not have to wait for iWork ’10 to get the new functions).

It would also be great if Apple revealed some plugin architecture for adding more functions. If there is such a thing, and Apple publish instructions for using it, we might get third parties completing the functions needed for Excel compatibility – and some new functions that are Numbers specific for doing some very cool number manipulations.

Hopefully this information is useful to someone. There could be mistakes in the spreadsheet – I did my best, but I did rush it a little. Let me know if there are any mistakes.

Anyway, I was interested in comparing functions in Excel to functions in Numbers. There are a lot more functions in Excel than Numbers, though most of the basics are in Numbers. I was thinking of writing a blog outlining the differences, but I got side tracked when I started looking at the Excel functions CODE and CHAR.

Excel tells me that CODE:

Returns a numeric code for the first character in a text string. The returned code corresponds to the character set used by your computer.

Numbers tells me:

The CODE function returns the Unicode code number of the first character in a specified string.

Ok – Numbers mentions Unicode. I figured I’d try some experiments with CODE and CHAR – using both Numbers and Excel.

I started Numbers and typed in a cell =CODE("A"). It returned 65. Not unexpected. I tried this in Excel. Same result.

So next I tried some Japanese. I typed in a Numbers cell =CODE("か"). That’s the hiragana character KA for those who can’t make it out (first character of my wife’s name for those wondering why I chose it). The result in Numbers was 12363 (304B in hex). This is the correct Unicode value.

I tried this in Excel. I got the result 95. Clearly an odd return value – but in Microsoft’s defence, they never promised CODE would work for double byte character sets. So I tried the reverse of CODE, that is =CHAR(95). It returned an “_” character.

I remembered though that Excel doesn’t work very well in Japanese, by default, using English Excel. You need to convert your application to use Japanese. Absolutely bizarre way to do things – most Applications on the Mac work with any language – no need to change the application in some way. Anyway, I followed the instructions to change to Japanese Excel. Some of the menus and dialogs are now in Japanese, but I can still do what I need for testing. So I test again:

=CODE("か") now returns 9259. That’s not Unicode either! I spent a lot of time trying to work out what that code represents. It turns out it is ISO-2022-JP.

So here are the results of my testing for each of these applications.

Results from Numbers

Results from English Excel

Results from Japanese Excel

Numbers stores its files as XML, and you can see the use of Unicode in the text:

...
<sf:formula-string sfa:string="=CODE(&quot;&#x304B;&quot;)"/>
...

So what does all this prove? Nothing really. Well, except that Numbers makes use of the more modern encoding format of Unicode more than Excel. The differences in CODE and CHAR could make for some obscure errors when importing Excel documents to Numbers documents, though I’m not sure these functions are generally used that much anyway. It would be interesting to hear how Japanese users of Numbers are finding the compatibility between files in Excel and files in Numbers.

Now, the boss wants to run Microsoft Office 2007 – which is Windows only (the Mac version is Office 2004). That’s ok – he can dual boot his machine, or run VMWare on OS X. So it was left to me to buy the software he needed.

I went to a local store to order Office 2007. The following is the actual conversation I had with the person working there.

Buying the Software

Me: Hi. I’d like to buy a copy of Office 2007.

Shop Assistant: No problem. What version would you like?

Now, I might not be too familiar with the Microsoft world, but I know enough to know that they have lots of different and confusing versions of software, and that Office is ridiculously expensive. Anyway, I’d done a little research, so knew what we needed.

Me: Standard edition.

Shop Assistant: Hmmmm. I don’t think there is such a thing. Let me check.

The shop assistant sits at his computer and looks up “Office 2007″. His screen fills with dozens of versions of the software. He examines the screen intently.

Shop Assistant: There is no “Standard” edition. We have “Professional”, we have “Small Business”, we have “Ultimate”, we have “Basic”, we have “Student”, we have…hmmm…lots of others. But no “Standard”.

Ok, that throws me a little. I know there is a “Standard” edition, but he can’t find it. I hadn’t heard of “Small Business”, and our company is a small business. But I should check what the “Basic” version is first.

Me: What’s in “Basic”?

Shop Assistant: Word, Excel and Outlook.

Me: We need Powerpoint too.

Shop Assistant: (Calls out to colleague) What version of Office 2007 has Powerpoint too?

Shop Assistant’s Colleague: Small Business

Me: What’s in Small Business then?

Shop Assistant: (Looks at screen) Hmmm. It also includes Publisher.

Now we don’t need Publisher. But if it is included, and the price is right, it doesn’t matter.

Me: How much is the Small Business edition?

Shop Assistant: (Tapping at keyboard) The OEM version of it is $300.

I can’t recall the exact amount he quoted, but it was along those lines. Now “OEM” is in the mix. Of course, we don’t have OEM versions of software for the Mac generally, so this is also new to me. It seems some companies will sell you the OEM version of software, even though they shouldn’t. I can only ask more questions.

Me: So, can you sell me the OEM version?

Shop Assistant: Not unless you buy a computer from me.

I’m getting frustrated.

Me: Ok, so how much for the “Retail” version of “Microsoft Office 2007 Small Business Edition”?

Shop Assistant: Hey? Hmmmm… (Looks on computer). It is $700!

Me: So, can I buy that?

Shop Assistant: No one buys the retail version! It is too expensive! I’ve never had anyone actually buy the retail version!

Me: But you can’t sell me the OEM version?

Shop Assistant: Only if you buy a computer.

I thanked him for his time and left. Went back to the office and ordered the “Standard” edition online, and it arrived a few days later at the office.

How is having so many confusing versions of the software a good thing? It just wasted a day of my time at least. And that was before I discovered “Activation”…

Activation

The software uses product “Activation“. This is also something new to me. Well, actually I’d experienced it a few days before when I installed Windows XP on the machine. What follows is the experience of a non-Windows user to the world of “Microsoft Activation”.

First, I’ve set up the Mac side of the machine, and it all works great. We also bought copies of iWork ’08 – and although it might not be as feature complete as Office in some areas, Keynote is leaps ahead of Powerpoint, Pages is beautiful, and Numbers is superb for general spreadsheets that end up looking fantastic rather than just a grid with some graphics in them.

Anyway, I’ve also bought and installed VMWare Fusion. And I’ve installed Boot Camp. I’ve then installed Windows XP.

Runs fine dual booted, and runs fine in VMWare. Now, Windows XP asks me to “Activate” it. I do so, over the internet.

It all works fine in VMWare. I then dual boot to Windows XP, and I’m shocked to see that it wants me to activate again (well, I’m not totally shocked, as I realise the way it works is that it sees this as a different hardware configuration. I guess I’m just surprised as I’m not use to this).

The trouble is, it says I’ve already used the activation key. Even though this is the same machine! So now I have to call Microsoft to tell them what has happened and get some huge number over the phone to activate the non-VMWare version of the software.

I do that – it wasn’t difficult, but it was time consuming. Now I can dual boot, or use VMWare. And all is fine. Unless I decide I want to reinstall, or repartition etc. Then, apparently, I may need to call Microsoft once more.

Truly, this is AWFUL. Why do Windows users put up with activation? It makes the law-abiding user feel like a criminal, and is a pain in the arse when it bites you (as in this case).

Anyway, I thought that was all behind me now. Until I installed Office 2007. Activation once again! Oh come on!

I get it activated over the internet, and it works fine. I now boot back to OS X, and use VMWare. Office starts, and says it needs to be activated. Oh not again!

Fortunately the same key works in VMWare. Trouble is, every time you dual boot, you need to activate Office in the new configuration – which means you need an internet connection. That’s probably something VMWare need to fix – but Activation is the cause of the problem.

Plain and simple: Activation sucks.

The main need for Launch! was that BigPond used an annoying feature called the heartbeat. Basically BigPond servers would ping your machine at certain times, and if your machine didn’t respond they would disconnect you. It seems no one else in the world uses such as system, and it caused all sorts of havoc for end users.

Launch! also provided a visual usage meter – bypassing the need to log in to BigPond web pages to find out if you were over your usage limit. By popular demand I released a standalone product – Launch! Usage Meter. This application just includes the usage meter component, and is used by BigPond ADSL users (who don’t have the heartbeat problems that cable users do). Before long, I was getting requests from people at other Australian ISPs for a similar usage meter – which led to Launch! TPG and Launch! Netspace.

Anyway, I digress. The big news this week is that BigPond have finally retired the heartbeat. Great news for all BigPond Cable users. This of course also means that Launch! will soon no longer be required.

I’m not sad to see it go. It was a pain that users needed a third party solution in order to connect reliably to the BigPond cable service. And it was sad that BigPond took so long to give Mac OS X users a reasonable piece of software to do this, and when they did it was basically a rip-off of my software, and didn’t keep up with the latest OS X releases so it only supported older versions of the OS.

I’m not sure if Launch! Usage Meter will continue to work when all the changes are made at BigPond. It is possible that BigPond will change the way metering works, so I’m afraid this application may also be close to the end. But I do want to thank everyone who supported these applications and thank you all for the contributions and letters of appreciation.