OK, this is my first official Outlook rant. There will be a more rational exploration of the pro's & con's of Outlook/Exchange in the next couple of weeks once the migration project has finished and things return to normal. But today, I just reached the end of my tether and had to let fly....

[RANT]
One of the things I hate is when software tries to guess what I want to do, not because I've selected it as a preference, or because I repeat the same action all the time, but just because it's what the software thinks you would want. Microsoft is often guilty of in many of it's applications, and I'm sure many people love some of these features, but they just drive me nuts. You know - like when you open Windows Explorer and it decides that of course, you must want to go to the "My Documents" folder, so it opens with that directory tree expanded, and everything else pushed down the screen. If you're like me and don't really use My Documents (because much of my work isn't in "documents" and I'll file things how I damn well please) then the first thing you have to do EVERY TIME is close that folder and then go to where you really want to go.

Outlook, however, has an infinitely more frustrating feature - it tries to "help" your editing by adding in spaces when you go back to make a correction within a previously entered word.

For example if I type this stence and then noticed my error, and wanted to go back and change it, I would put my cursor after the "s" and start typing "en". Instead of getting "sentence" I would get "s en tence" which I then have to go back and fix. Now I'm a rapid type-while-thinking person, so I make lots of mistakes and continually want to go back and edit things - so you can imagine how frustrating this gets after a couple of times.

I'm guessing this doesn't happen for people using Word as an Editor, but that has it's own problems (which I'll rant about later), but right now, I'm almost resorting to typing up my longer emails in Notes first, then pasting into Outlook just to avoid it's pathetic formatting and it's "help"!

Please Microsoft, just STOP TRYING TO HELP - you only make me want to throw the computer out the window in frustration.
[/RANT]

I'm sure there are many more examples of when software (even non-MS) tries to help too much - does anyone else have any favourites?

Ok, so I completely missed blogging in May, but that doesn't mean we haven't been working. Tim & I have just relaunched the new-look (and hopefully more functional) Dominoblogs.com.

We have added some additional features like the ability to view blogs by region, title, author or category, rss feeds to the new entries, and the ability to store a bit more information about your blog (languages, content tags, SnTT feeds).

Now, before anyone jumps in - this is still a work-in-progress. We are hoping OPML builders and search functions will be available soon.

There has been a bit of discussion over at Jake Howlett's site about exactly what dominoblogs.com should provide - the old UI was (correctly) critised, but I hope we've sorted most of the biggies out with the new interface. The discussion also turned to a mechanism for rating blogs - some are looking for "I like reading this blog", others for "I know this is mostly technical stuff about Domino". There have been some interesting suggestions on ways this could be done, but I don't think we'll start to build anything until the community at large is sure of what it wants.

From my point of view I still think ratings are dangerous, and intimidating to new players, but it does seem like something that people want. While I like the simplicity of Ben's suggestion of a simple category system, I think anything which requires people to constantly update a rating system is kind of doomed to failure.

Anyway - head over and have a look and let us know what you think.

PS. There is also a link button which you could add to your site to help advertise dominoblogs.com