Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find?
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Took me a while to figure out this is some kind of autoreplace thing in Outlook that switches out emoticons with characters from the wingdings font, and J is a smiley face.
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/53358dd4ecad04e75a8...
When my teenage kids text me, I make sure that they use complete sentences. I'm a bit of a bastard that way, but hopefully they'll be better off later on in life.
WingDings mapped the 'J' character to smiley face; when the email goes to a client without that font installed, it just displays the original character in the default font.
Old New Thing is an awesome blog! J
(It will be a box with a question mark, probably.)
I also wonder how much energy is collectively wasted sending that extra line in every email. It must add up to something from a storage, energy use, rendering, etc perspective. I wonder if it offsets any behavior changes that may help the environment by those who actually don't print. I doubt that little message is going to stop anyone from printing.
For reference: http://i.imgur.com/I1GET1w.png
Do you know how it looks to outlook users?
On at least one occasion I've printed an email and ended up using an extra page because of the extended "Please think twice" section.
"Fehlt das ß auf der Tastatur eines Computers oder einer Schreibmaschine, schreibt man dafür ss."
Translation: "If the ß is missing on a computer keyboard or typewriter, you have to write 'ss' instead".
[0] http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/doppel-s...
They just sound the same to my hears, so I got around it by memorizing the respective use cases.
OTOH it could also be just spending priorities of updating street signs vs. other things.
I knew nothing about the phasing-out of ß until reading the comments on this article.
In Switzerland, "ss" is standard (Duden says: "In der Schweiz kann das ß generell durch ss ersetzt werden <§ 25 E2>.") I haven't seen "Strasse" on signs in Germany, but there might be regional variation (since street signs are a local-government responsibility)
For bonus points, ask about the localized Excel formulas. And date formats! That is so brain freezingly stupid I can not for my life comprehend it. It causes no end of trouble when moving data between versions.
This is why I always prefer dedicated windows apps over cross-platform apps.
Most recent thing that bit me in that regard was ReSharper.
Microsoft arrogance aside: Gigantic, bloated, monolithic proprietary applications, written by a company known to be privacy-hostile and surveillance-friendly, handling your potentially sensitive communcations? I think not.
Lower TCO, has all the same features of Exchange (plus some collaboration features Exchange lacks), plus it's open source so you can hack on it or make your own custom modules if you desire.
In corporate environment Exchange/Outlook is an awesome tool for e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, contacts, booking resources, etc.
I had to use Lync at my last job and to be honest it was one of the contributing factors to my leaving.
It breaks links, it breaks basic copy/paste functionality in clear and obvious ways, it wastes screen real estate like its going out of style, it's slow clunky and cumbersome... No Thankyou.
For Polish, does the left Alt key generate "ś"? Or the right Alt key? Or both?
Good management involves prioritizing these things in order to sort out the contradictions, and good employees help with this process by pushing back against directives that contradict what appear to be more important goals.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/53176/why-does-backsp...
Other times, focus detection breaks randomly and you're in a text box but something happens and, whoops, off you go to the previous page. I don't know how often these early web guys thought we'd be going back, but mapping it to one of the largest and most frequently used keys is asinine.
Andreeson recently said that his team always thought of the front and back buttons as half-assed solutions until they could figure out something better. Guess that's probably never going to change.
Bill says "Why isn't Ctrl+F mapped to forward?"
Developer hears "Bill wants this mapped to Ctrl+F. I'd better it do it or I'm fired."
Bill means "Please map this to forward, unless there is a really good reason otherwise, in which case I expect you not map it to forward, but tell me the reason why not."
Is this a Linux thing?
I do accidentally close Firefox from time to time, though: The problem is that Shift-Control-W is "close window" instead of "close tab". Which makes sense, but sometimes I hit it by mistake, typically when I mean to hit Shift-Control-T. Don't know there's anything they could do to fix that.
But this is worse. Pressing Command+W in Skype chat asks if you want to remove person from your favourites. At one specific version it actually closed the window. Go figure.
Though considering "close window" is so disruptive when you hit it by accident, an optional "close the window?" dialog would be nice.
No I believe that he meant exactly that and even then he wouldn't "have been convinced". The engineers never are (about usability issues)
Maybe that's just the emacs background talking though.
Perhaps Bill would have fired them, but if he's as smart as people say he is he would've been convinced by a good counterargument.
For example, at the moment it's, "why is Outlook ruining my life?"
Give it a rest, people.
Programmatically rescheduling an instance of a recurring meeting that has users on different timezones and daylight savings time adjustments. That's pain that I will never forget.
For bonus points be that guy who had to implement such things on Lotus Domino.
If it was perfect, people probably would not need plugins for it.
#IfWinActive, ahk_class rctrl_renwnd32
^f::Send, {F4}You have Ctrl-F as discussed which is completely different to the rest of windows.
You have alt-S for send as well which is used in some language for special characters.
And the most annoying is shift+enter. When you want a single line break in an HTMl email it sends it instead. This has a warning now.
No end of grief those have given me.
I'm on Outlook 2007, so I don't know if the preference has moved in 2010 or 2013, but:
Tools > Options > E-mail Options > Advanced E-Mail Options > uncheck "Press CTRL+ENTER to send messages"
Ctrl-enter is send in at least the US version of Outlook, it has been for years (e.g. at least the last decade I think.)
Shift-enter is single new line, across all versions of Office apps.
Alt together some character is used as hotkey in ALL applications. Hold it down and you will see a small underline under (usually) the first character of most buttons, press this character on the keyboard and the button will be pressed. I think it would collide with S quite frequently. It is AltGr-S you are supposed to use for localized S-characters.
It's like if you discovered that your newly-built SF apartment building wasn't earthquake-resistant, and you asked an engineer from the construction company, "Why are you building new apartment buildings in San Francisco that aren't resistant to earthquakes?", and the engineer answered, "Well, we designed our first apartments 150 years ago when people didn't know very much about earthquakes." The answer is a non-answer, and the practice itself is unsustainable.
Countless times I have wished that there was an operating system level option to choose keymapping (emacs, vi, cua, whatever) and _all_ applications will respect that.
It is surprising how "discoverable" many of the keyboard choices are/were in older editors. In emacs? C-c C-(first letter of what you want to do) probably works if you are in a minor mode. If not, try C-h b to see the bindings.
Though, I should say that it was a quick trip to firemacs to get the behavior I wanted.
The advantages of saving the file over not closing the browser are two:
1. it's persistent across reboots / power failure (a pressing concern on an old machine that sometimes decides it's time for an unannounced reboot);
2. it scales well with the number of articles I want to save—I'd rather have 100 files saved than 100 tabs open, and the former doesn't cause any slow-down.
> Do you have a workflow where you save to a specific place to see when you are on the train?
I'm not sure that I understand the question; sorry.
So, I would think it would be great if you could "triage" pages you wanted to save for later. Even if I could move them from a "to read" to a "read" pile would be awesome. Didn't know if you had any pointers on making that happen.
Edit: I should say, btw, I actually do use my "don't close tabs" for the train. My commutes are typically small, so I don't do large readings.
Not really; I do a first, basic sort when saving according to very crude topic (Math, CS, news, …). When I actually read, I treat it essentially as if I were reading online; unless I really enjoy the file, I delete it after reading. If I do enjoy it, I move it to a separate 'permanent' storage area.
One advantage of this over bookmarks for me is that I somehow spend more time looking at my directory tree than my bookmarks, and so am more bothered by an enormous (in the sense of number of files, not size) directory than by my bookmarks becoming, as you say, a massive dumping ground. Thus, having the files on disk somehow seems to cause me to deal with them, either sorting them more carefully or deleting them, much sooner (or, at least, before the end of time :-) ).
It may be; I just have a foolish built-in mindset that "PDF is big, and HTML is small" (uncontaminated by anything silly like checking the sizes of PDF and HTML versions of the same page). Since I usually only use this to queue up casual reading, it's not very important to me that it be an extremely faithful copy; I just grab the "Print view" if there is one.
Firefox, with "Web page, complete", and Safari, with "Web archive", are both pretty good at grabbing dependencies. If I really want a good mirror, then I use wget.
In an ideal world, there would be ~ 26 core commands that do (essentially) the same thing in each application. We're nearly there (cut,copy,paste,open,save,print,etc.) but actions like 'refresh' are poorly served.
However, Apple's poor shortcut choices are made much less egregious by a built-in way of (re)defining custom shortcuts (under System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts); Windows does not natively offer such an option, I think.
"Type the menu command for which you want to set a keyboard shortcut in the Menu Title field. You must type the command exactly as it appears in the Application menu, including ellipses and any other punctuation. An ellipsis is a special character that looks like three periods. To type an ellipsis, press Option-semicolon, or use the Character Viewer. It may be difficult to know whether the command is written in the menu with a real ellipsis or with three periods, so if one does not work, try the other."
(In fact, I seem to remember some sort of 'macro recorder' from back in the Tiger days that worked on the level of literal mouse motion (and was fully as fragile as it sounded, since it obviously relied heavily on the exact position of things on screen). Does anyone else remember something like that?)
I guess so, if one knows how to read NIB files (which I'm sure any OS X programmer does, but I don't):
$ cd /Applications/Safari.app; grep -r 'Show Top Sites' * Binary file Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ToolbarItems.nib matches
> Seems like this could be accessed via some kind of API.
Sure, and there's no need even for it to be a public API, since it's Apple software that sets the shortcut. My question wasn't how the program should handle it, but what would be the best way to present the choice to a (non-programmer) user.
Try Shift + Enter to start a newline.
And forget about finding useful excel functions online cause the are all English functions.
If might sound like a good idea until you try it. Working just becomes really inconsistent, and hard.
The thing that the first letter is the keyboard shortcut helps a bit when trying to remember but it does not help initially when looking for the shortcut.
Of course they could fix MS Word's HTML output and fix Outlook to use MSIE's rendering engine ... but that'd only reduce lockin by allowing Outlook users emails to be read properly in other MUA. Never going to happen.
I believe up to 2003 this was an option that was not enabled by default too.
e.g. an known Outlook 2010 bug (with Exchange 2013) crash the Outlook client on startup. But you can still open *.msg files, it opens the mail in a window and one can edit the mail.
It's all about Bill Gates vision "information at your fingertips" from the early nineties and the Cairo operating system.
Watch this video from Bill Gates Comdex '90: http://youtu.be/kL8zoQVJaD8?t=19m26s
Cairo '91-'96: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_operating_system
Now Lotus Notes is dead. Exchange/Outlook at the current front runners, and they are producing really lazy email clients and not really pushing email forward at all.
What can be done? No clue. The only organisation seemingly able to compete with Microsoft in this arena is Google with their Google Apps for business/education offering. But that has its own issues.
At least Microsoft has made "Outlook Online" a lot better in recent years thanks to their push for Office 365 Subscriptions.
PS - Search in Outlook is shockingly terrible. For some reason during the Vista era someone at Microsoft said: "Let's make search terrible in all of our products." So Vista's search was junk (read: replace a nice Windows 95 search sidebar with hidden obscure magic keywords which didn't work, and only index "known" file types (which is none)) and that filtered down to Outlook which got a huge bloated indexer which is inconsistent, slow, and still relies on magic keywords to accomplish anything. PPS - Thunderbird also has a terrible search indexer, however it also offers simple filtering which is wonderful. You can disable what they call their "global indexer" (which you should, it sucks) and then just use the "quick search" box within each folder, it is insanely quick, and the filtering options offered a huge efficiency gain.
Win 7 & 8, Outlook 2007 & 2010, respectively. FWIW.
The PST file fuckery is the one thing I wish it handled differntly. After that it would be the mess of things caused by 'borrowing' from Word/IE when it comes to composing and viewing emails.
It seems to me, that nobody really can write a real good eMail clients.
Also I dream of GUI textfields with emacs keybindings. I can't fathom Ctrl-$arrow in Windows for instance. I need my home row.
Usability for the boss improved. Usability for most users degraded.
(Hey, if I save most of us from clicking on link-baity headlines that could just have easily contained the answer to the question, we all win, right? Right.)
As far as I can tell, there is no ctrl+f/F3 style find function in Outlook. You have the search feature, but that behaves differently from ctrl+f.
I've taken to copying email threads and pasting them into Word or Notepad if I need to do a proper find.
^^edit^^
I went out of my way to find out how to do a "find" in Outlook:
ctrl+shift+F for an "advanced" find
F4 for a simple find