Outlook 2010 is great, its a lovely piece of software and by all means it has a lot of cool features, but its connectivity with my blackberry sucks, which rendered half of it completely useless to me.

And I can’t seem to find a way to send feedback without the send a smile thing, which to me is essentially ‘let’s take a snapshot of your computer, processes, and anything else we like to peruse’ so I’m not a fan of that.

So, when I get home I think I will probably uninstall 2010, stick with my 2007 which doesn’t have outlook.

I do like the interface though. It looks very pretty and everything I need is fairly easy to access, although the send receive button could maybe be somewhere on the home tab in the ribbon thing – its more nitpicking than anything.

But as it is it annoys me, I am thinking of leaving it in favour of online email (apps by Google) and the email on my blackberry, the combination of the two will do me nicely .

[written from my blackberry, on opera mini, which is brilliant]

Turns out they’ve pulled the above one, apparently some of their customers found it offensive.

While the ads are great, I don’t think their entirely representative, when I used IE8, I didn’t really like it, it seems almost as slow as IE7 (maybe it’s just my computer) and I didn’t like that. Firefox for me, still

It’s bloody brilliant. The website bills it as a solution for people “Drowning in Email” – it’s so much more than that. With one click, I can instantly see everything I’ve exchanged with a particular contact; any files, conversations – the whole lot. It picks up information on the contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn; all the stuff like that, and provides a complete profile on that email address.

I receive about 300 emails a day, and Xobni allows me to manage conversations; find previous shared files, and just makes the whole experience so much easier. It’s search is also vastly superior to the somewhat rubbishy one built into Outlook 2003; which is what I use right now.

I guess, in essence, it’s made what I have to do easier and faster; so a big thankyou to whoever had that great idea

The great, powerful and rich nodded in approval.

But then some of them decided it had to die. Namely, Microsoft and Intel. Both had their own reasons and methods, but neither would admit it.

Three years later, the philanthropic scheme is still alive, but not operating at the scale that it may have been originally invisaged. It’s founder had had totally underestimated the competition put up by big companies, against a not-for-profit scheme aimed at improving the world.

“I had wildly underestimated,” says Negroponte, “the degree to which commercial entities will go to disrupt a humanitarian project.”

I think there are two big reasons what Intel and Microsoft didn’t like the XO laptop. The first is that it uses an AMD processor. This was unacceptable to Intel, who hold 75% (roughly) of the market, with AMD in second. The idea of hundreds of thousands of AMD powered latops out there was intolerable to Intel – they might even lose their market leadership. So they decided it had to go.

The second was that it uses it’s own operating software, called Sugar. Not Windows, which is considered the industry standard. While Apples’ is (in my opinion) better, Microsoft has made windows seem like a necessity, and the idea of hundreds of thousands of computers running something different would have seriously worried Gates.

So, each did their own thing to kill the XO, with Intel trying to do it with a competing laptop, and Bill Gates using his considerable influence. I’m writing this because of something I read a few months back when I signed up to do this post, and disgusted me then, and still does now. It’s unfortunate that the XO hasn’t really done as well as predicted, because it would have done a lot to help with poverty, giving 3rd world people access to at least some of what we have now. I understand that OLPC are planning to release a new version sometime soon, according to their website.

Hope you enjoyed this, even though it was shorter than I planned for it to be.

This is my Blog Action Day 2008 post, which I signed up to do a few months ago.

The website has a strange URL, but the design is quite funky, it was designed by 9 Star Research, according to the footer.

It sounds like a good scheme, although Microsoft haven’t quite gotten round to making an agreement with the college im going to yet (I’m in Wales, so I’m not hopeful), so I won’t be able to use it soon, but a friend of mine has, and he said it was a quick download, and the programs activated quickly and easily.

Dear Microsoft,

Please get in contact with my college and sort it out so I can use this.

Thanks

George

I’ll be looking forward to me being able to get some of the stuff on there, it looks pretty promising

I mean, it does all these html tags for Technorati and all that stuff, but nothing that makes it send-able to WordPress. Seems a bit stupid to me I’ve manually tagged this one after uploading it from WLW, and I’ll go find out if it’s possible to tag later.

Live writer is an excellent bit of kit, nicely made, and it works very nicely. It’s just a stupid pity that they didn’t manage to include tagging

Any advice on how to setup tagging on this would be appreciated, otherwise I’ll go googling

And yeah, this is meant to be just for US residents. Nicely done MS.

My sound card stopped working, errors showed up left right and center, and system restore didn’t work. Not so great.

I’ve fixed it now, but it just goes to show how rubbish the Windows upgrade system is. I had a look around, and Windows even posted a knowledgebase article about it, apparently it’s a problem across the whole range. However, their steps for fixing it are entirely useless. Every single step failed. I ended up reinstalling the driver, but not through Windows’ own system, oh no. That failed, “Driver installer has stopped working. Close this program”. Update failed. Pretty much everything threw up errors of some sort.

Instead, I went manually searching for the sound card driver, downloaded it, and patched the original one myself. After about half an hour of trying to follow the Microsoft instructions. Nice one, guys.

What worries me is that I’ve got 2 other Windows XP machines to upgrade to SP3 soon. Not looking forward to that.

There are hundreds of thousands of people out there (a number which, up until recently, included me) who just go with the flow, say it’s crap, and it’s done a lot of damage to a system which really isnt that bad.

It’s not perfect, but the new features and functions, and more importantly, the new look, give it a great new feel, and for me (I was running it on a fast machine, though) it was pretty quick, and faster than I’ve seen XP on that machine (I think). It wasn’t one of my computers, actually my cousins, although I’ve just ordered my new one, which will have Vista on it .

So, while I still think Ubuntu is probably better, Vista is getting there, and maybe with a bit more work (SP2, guys ) It could really become a system people love, rather than hate. 

For those who just went with the flow, try it. It’s not fair to slag it off without having a proper play with it first.

And, with regards to the post I linked to, I quite like the Aero interface. So there.