Train the peepers on this little gem, courtesy of Outlook 2007:

Check out the Send/Receive option. Initially this caught my eye because it’s the one option that isn’t checked, and I am very aware that yes, I actually do have a send/receive button. My first thought was, “Huh, OK, so a checkmark bug?” Nope, notice immediately below it, the exact same send/receive item, CHECKED, and disabled. But the home run is that if you check the one you can check, you end up with 2 identical send/receive buttons on your toolbar. You can hide every other button, but you can have either 1 or 2 Send/Receives. Wacky! Maybe this is the fault of some add-in? If so, fair enough, but otherwise, come on!

I was crestfallen to see the same crap UI when I fired up Outlook 2007 for the first time. I’ve been using Word’s new ribbon bar (the official name of its “super toolbar”), and I like it, and couldn’t wait to see what they’d done to Outlook, the app that needed the most ribbon bar love. Not much. The ribbon bar is on other windows, but the overhaul of Outlook’s main view that I was hoping for still stands as long overdue.

Also on this same subject, I don’t like how new apps hide the pull down menus completely until you press Alt+F. Windows Media Player did this, but the annoyance was lost in the noise, in that app. But since, I’ve seen it in Live Messenger, and a couple other applications. Why make the menu bar secret? Everyone, and I mean literally “everyone,” as in, most of the people on this PLANET, are now familiar with the concept of a menu at the top of your (app,screen) that you use to access features.

Supposing you buy the argument that we need to replace menu bars because they’re a crap UI construct (and maybe they are, I don’t agree but I see the validity of that argument - hunting for options through them is difficult), there’s still the issue of why, then, the menu bar is there at all. If the menu bar sucks, take it out entirely, and don’t regress - let me do everything I could do with it via some other UI. But it’s incorrect to hide the bar when it contains functionality you can’t get anywhere else.

Maybe you want to phase it out? Fine, but then in that case - it should be a preference: “Use New UI” vs. “Use Classic UI” or something. And again, there should be feature parity between both options.

The “secret” menu bar just teaches people to press Alt+F if they’re stuck.

I got to thinking today about how in the late 90s I wrote a lot of stuff online. Back when Y2K was still selling bomb shelters, I had a pretty regular stream of writing going - most notably at gamedev.net, but in the 7 or 8 years since, it’s kind of fallen by the wayside. But, I decided today that letting that happen was a sad thing, and have thus resolved myself towards more active participation in this here “Internet Thing.”

I will christen this re-emergence by giving a shout out to some of my favorite OTHER blogs (in no particular order):

• Pharyngula - science goodness with a dash of cephalopod
• Coding Horror - obligatory reading for programmers
• Joel on Software - again, obligatory
• And finally, the gawkers: LifeHacker,Giz, Consumerist, and Kotaku.

Save this IP! More episodes of C# on Two Beers, more chords, more articles, and more awesomeness in general all coming soon.

I’m working with some friends to make a game for dream/build/play, and we’ve decided to keep a blog about our experiences this year. So, if XNA’s your thing, and you want to watch the spectacle that is our group, The International Conspiracy, head on over to http://internationalconspiracy.wordpress.com to catch the action as it unfolds.

Tonight I decided to combine two things I greatly enjoy: Sam Adams Boston Lager and building tiny applications, in a personal experiment to see if my Ballmer’s Peak was different in C# than in C++. Read the rest of this entry »