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> 1. There is no magical flag that allows all mail sent by anyone at Microsoft to hit your Hotmail inbox: that could easily be abused, and for many users it would defy their expectations. I've sent your post along to the people responsible for spam filtering in Hotmail, though, to take a look at.

Magical flag? No. S/MIME certificate? Yes. They already sign their apps and have UAC verify those signatures; why not their email?

1- I've never seen a company's automatic emails be flagged by its own mail system, that's pretty impressive.

2- I'm actually using Firefox, and I had 2 instances of that plugin installed for some reason, and it still gave me the error. Although my main point is that the error dialog doesn't tell you the real problem.

And btw I like OneNote, it just seems I won't be using the desktop version.

1- I've never seen a company's automatic emails be flagged by its own mail system, that's pretty impressive.

It's as fair and annoying as having downloads blocked from Microsoft's website on a freshly installed server. (On one hand, at least they treat their site the same but on the other hand, it's putting yet another needless hurdle in the way of what I want to do. If I didn't trust Microsoft why would I be running Windows at all?)

"there's no browser-native way for a website to launch a program on your PC."

What happened to file type associations? Even with the Adobe Reader plugin disabled, my browser gets enough information from the OS to offer me the choice of saving a PDF or opening it in the standalone Adobe Reader. Why can't that work for OneNote files?

When you open Office documents from SkyDrive or Sharepoint, the goal is to open the remote copy, not to download it. This enables such niceties as letting multiple people edit the document at the same time, etc. while still using the full Office clients.

So just download the equivalent of a bittorrent tracker file, containing all the information necessary for the standalone client to connect. Sure, it adds another filetype to the association database, but that's not a very big price to pay.

That was my first thought as well, and I still think it's a decent idea. The main drawback is that Bob Someguy might not understand that the file he's got is just a link. If that's the case, he's going to be confused about why it's updating online when he's editing his 'local copy', annoyed when he can't work offline, and possibly lose data when he edits an actual local copy thinking he's got a link.

Those problems can be mostly solved without much trouble. First, if the user chooses to open the file instead of saving it to their downloads folder, then it will be downloaded to a temporary folder and you don't have to worry about the user finding it again and trying to re-open it. Either way, it makes sense for the standalone program to remove the downloaded file the first time it is used to successfully establish a connection, and instead store the connection information in an internal library, presented to the user in a way that makes it clear that the files are online.

Deleting a user's file without their understanding is generally a bad idea. e.g. Bob saves the file to his Downloads folder and opens it. The next day he wants to open it again only to find that it's missing. He eventually learns that he has to re-download every time. Microsoft gets blamed for the 'bug'.

If you design your app's UI properly, it will disabuse the user of the notion that files that are not stored on the computer should be accessible through the local file browser. When using the Amazon MP3 downloader, I doubt people expect to have to re-open the .amz file every time they want to listen to that album. They learn to find their music in iTunes or Windows Media Player. This model should work just as well for OneNote, which already handles most file management internally.

Does Amazon actually delete the amz file?

> 1. There is no magical flag that allows all mail sent by anyone at Microsoft to hit your Hotmail inbox: that could easily be abused, and for many users it would defy their expectations. I've sent your post along to the people responsible for spam filtering in Hotmail, though, to take a look at.

If you have a system that sends automated mail, it would do you well to test it with common email hosts (particularly the one provided by your company). Maybe they did, and this one got through anyway.

For #2, couldn't a custom URL protocol launch a program?

Yes, but in this case (at least for IE) the plugin has been installed all the way back since Office 2003. The custom protocol handler would only work in newer versions of Office.

As always, tradeoffs abound.

Can you sniff for the plugin? If so, use the plugin when available and use a custom protocol at other times. Office 2010 could get an update to handle the protocol and Office 20next could just drop the plugin entirely.

there's no browser-native way for a website to launch a program on your PC.

I played a game called Vindictus a while ago, and it did just that. I'd click a link on their webpage, and it would launch the executable. I'm not sure exactly how the mechanics work, so unfortunately I can't describe it in detail.

You don't need a plugin to open a program. Just set the mime type and file extension, and let the OS pick the program.

Or at the very minimum you download a small file (not an exe, a data file), and let the user double click it to open the program associated with it.

18 minutes to download and install? Evernote takes like what, 2 minutes? I imagine there's an eloquent reason for that as well. Not to be snarky, but i would just love to see some of the discussions that take place these days at Microsoft.

Probably because it was the whole office set of programs that was being downloaded. No idea of there was an option to just download Onenote but should have been there.