Buggin' My Life Away

Mom always said, “The only good thing about beating your head against the wall is that it feels good when you stop.” Well, sorry Mom, but that’s not fully true. While you’re sitting on the couch buried beneath an ice pack, you...

Anatomy of a Software Bug Chris Mason is the person who hired me to work at Microsoft. By the time he hired me, he’d already spent a great deal of time looking into the issue of general software quality, and had written a memo...

I've had a number of people, both in comments and in private e-mail, ask me about continuing development on Mac Messenger. Until now, I could only give cryptic answers to those questions. No longer. Mac Messenger 5.0 was released to the web today. ...

My dad always used to say, “Call me anything you want. Just don’t call me late for dinner.” If variables and functions in computer programs were sentient beings, I wonder if they’d say the same thing. As religious wars go among...

Scott Byer at Adobe put up a very nice post about the switch to intel and some of the growing pains many of us are going through. While I've added my own comments to Scott's piece, a number of my colleagues in Mac BU have asked me to weigh in on the subject...

Mac Word Notes View and OneNote Chris Pratley has blogged about OneNote , with a number of follow-ups here , here and here . Now that we’ve released a demo of Mac Office 2004 that mentions the new Notebook Layout...

Scoble dropped the hint , and Mary Jo Foley spilled the beans . C|New has also jumped the gun on this . There's a piece on Channel 9 over here , and it won't be long before the official press release is here . (I waited more than 10 minutes past the deadline...

There’s been a bit of flak about the Office Open XML file format converters for Mac Office. Sheridan posted an update on MacMojo, and Schwieb weighed in regarding some of the comments that people have made. There’s quite a bit of speculation gong on,...

Martin Sevior wonders how one talks to me . Well, you come over to my blog, and you leave a comment. I'd have answered Martin's question by leaving a comment there, but his blog doesn't have comments turned on.   Rick Currently playing in iTunes: Whipping...

I came across this rant about feature requests in Gnome. I have to confess a sense of siding with the OSS developers on this one. The author of the editorial doesn't get into full swing until she quotes the following statement from the Gnome web site...

Scene: A fly-over view of Microsoft's campus focuses in on the building that houses Mac BU. The camera "flight" enters one of the offices through a window. During the fly-over, a voice-over says: New 3.0 GHz Mac Pro: $3,599.00 Two 23" Apple Cinema...

Yesterday I posted a link to Todd Bishop’s More on Mac BU. Among the comments to Todd’s article is a question I’ve seen and heard before: When is Microsoft going to port Office to Cocoa? The question, the frequency with which it gets asked in various venues and the common tone that suggests Carbon is a second-class citizen to Cocoa’s aristocratic blood-lines, all suggest that there’s still a great deal of misunderstanding out there regarding these two technologies. ......

Over on DaringFireball, John Gruber points out an annoyance he has with icons used for "Save". Specifically, he doesn't like the idea of using a floppy disk as the icon, and he, rather snarkily, suggests using "S-a-v-e" to mean "Save". Couple of problems...

Since I’m a n00b in the bloggosphere, I suppose a brief introduction is appropriate. So.....

So the rumors have been true. Apple is moving to Intel processors, which, in some ways, makes sense. At least it does from Apple's point of view. The Kool-Aid has never really affected their ability to figure out what's right for Apple regardless of the...

Following up to my last post on outlining, Marc Hedlund, one of the co-authors of Peer-to-Peer (O’Reilly), wrote about Word being too smart . Marc’s thesis is summed up in the last paragraph, where he says, “What the Word team lacks, in my view, is an...

Eric Raymond posted a rant about the CUPS installer. Then John Gruber commented on the rant, and Don Box talked about Eric's idea of "The Luxury of Ignorance." I'd seen Eric's rant earlier, but found John's response via Don's post last night. Today...

Whenever I used a word like adumbrate , my Grandmother would say, “Your high ejaculations are too copious for the low dominion of my comprehension.” Gran always had a wicked sense of humor. She ran a beauty salon for decades. One day, a customer, who...

Ground Rules Having had some time to browse a few of the other blogs on msdn.com, I think it only appropriate to be clear and up-front about a few things. The first is that this weblog is mine. If you click on the "Home"...

Life in Whoville There are some questions that I just hate being asked. About six months after our first child was born, people would ask me if my life had returned to normal. How on earth am I supposed to know? “Normal”...

C++ provides us with a number of ways we can shoot ourselves in the foot. If you work as a developer on any sizeable software project, there is quite likely a set of rules about limitations as to the C++ language features you’re allowed to use: no...

I was all set to post an article about Mac BU’s place in Microsoft’s recent reorg, when John Welch at bynkii.com posted this . I appreciate John’s advocacy on behalf of Mac BU. His heart’s always been in the right place. Unfortunately, John’s understanding...

Repro, Man Written communication is amazingly difficult. Even when you’re aware of some of the pitfalls, as I was when I wrote my last post about the disk full save error in Word, it’s still all too easy say something that...

One of the things we noticed when we first started doing some rigorous usability studies with Word is the way people used the tab key. It’s a holdover from typewriter days: you want to indent a line of text, so you hit the tab key a few times. It’s one...

Scripting Word Now, this is weird. My more recent tasks have involved working with both the Word testers and the automated testing group to iron out some ways that we can improve on testing. In particular, now that Word has a more...