go ahead, mac my day

Inbox 482

I'm an Inbox Zero kind of girl. Inbox Zero doesn't hold up when you go on vacation. I just got back from Kaua'i [1]. I didn't check my email or do anything at all work-related while I was gone, which is quite impressive for me. (The posts that came up here were written and queued up before I left.)

I use rules extensively to manage my mail. My goal is that only items that are directly addressed to me end up in my inbox. When I got back into the office on Wednesday, my inbox had 432 unread items in it. That, of course, wasn't all of the unread email that I had. My total across all of my folders was north of 2200.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday digging out from that email. I'm not done yet, and it'll probably be towards the middle of next week until I get back to Inbox Zero. Right now, my inbox has 37 items in it which need my attention. To get to that point, I used all of my usual tricks for finding my way out from all that email.

[1] If you're interested, I posted a bunch of pictures to my Twitter feed. This picture is the first one I took in Kaua'i, and that links you to the other ones that I posted too.

Paul Robichaux: "The iPhone as a mail device, 3.0 edition"

Paul Robichaux, one of the Exchange MVPs (who happens to know his way around Entourage very well), posted a great blog post considering the iPhone as a mail device, 3.0 edition. The gist of his post is in his executive summary:

Apple invested a ton of time in the 3.0 release, but most of it went to other aspects of the OS, not into the messaging and calendaring experience.

Paul knows Exchange better than most people, and he's well familiar with Windows Mobile 6.5, so his post has plenty of great details about places where the iPhone shines and where it doesn't.

design research as the fourth estate

The Adaptive Path blog recently had a fantastic post about design research as the fourth estate. They've taken the nine elements of journalism from The Elements of Journalism and applied them to design research, and came up with the following:

1. Design research's first obligation is to the truth.
2. Its first loyalty is to the citizens.
3. Its essence is discipline of verification.
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting, and relevant.
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.

We're in high research season here in MacBU, so this is particularly relevant for me right now. I'm doing lots of research right now. Reading over their article, it's ringing quite true for me. I'd like to think on it and figure out if there are better ways to ensure that I'm meeting these tenets in my research.

Using Entourage to manage your mail

I just noticed that the folks over at the Unclutterer blog have posted a great post about how to use Entourage to manage email.

Q&A: Do participants in your usability studies have to be in the San Francisco or Puget Sound areas?

In my overzealousness in killing off trackback spam (grrr), I accidentally deleted a comment asking about participating in usability studies. I was asked:

Do they absolutely HAVE to be in the Bay area? I'd be glad to help, and have signed up for usability studies, but I'm not in the Bay area.

For the Entourage study that my team is running next week, yes, users absolutely must be in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The majority of the research that my team does is conducted in-house in either Redmond, Washington, or Mountain View, California. While we do complete studies occasionally outside of our home base, it's much less frequent, for many reasons.

I'm located here. Yes, I can (and do) travel, but it's a big hit to my schedule and my productivity. I'd need to travel to another location for a week, plus set-up time. I'm completely inaccessible to the rest of my team for all of that time.

The team is located here. Usability studies are much more powerful when the application team has the opportunity to observe it and see the participants themselves. The report that I bring back to the team is useful, but actually seeing a user struggle with something is more compelling than simply hearing me describe it. While the team can travel, it's much less of time hit for them to walk over to the usability lab across campus, as opposed to getting on a plane and flying to Columbus, Ohio.

I can do more studies when I'm here, because the turn-around time is much faster. If I conduct studies elsewhere, recruiting participants takes longer because I don't have easy access to the same kind of infrastructure that I do here. If I decide today that I want to do a study here in Mountain View, I can have 10 participants in my lab here in two weeks or less. If I decide today that I want to do a study in, say, New York, it will take me at least a month to get those participants because I'll either have to rely on my internal infrastructure to find them (and they're not optimised to find participants that far away) or because I'll have to contract to an outside agency to find them (which has its own time requirements to get up and running).

I can conduct some studies remotely, but not every study lends itself to this format. For my next study, I'm working with low-fidelity prototypes, which require a fair amount of in-person manipulation by the researcher to work. For that kind of study, remote participants simply can't provide the kind of interaction and feedback that I need. Further, using remote participants is both more difficult for me to recruit for, and ensuring that they have everything set up on their computer for me to be able to conduct the study and get the data that I need is time-consuming.

This isn't to say that we don't do studies outside of our home base, just that the majority of them are conducted where I have easy access to facilities, participants, and my team.

Mac users still needed!

My team here in MacBU is still in need of Mac mail/calendar/contacts users. For full details of what I need, read this post and email the address contained in there.

Edited on 6/17/2009 at 6pm: I now have all of the participants that I need for this study.  You can still sign up to be notified about future Mac studies in your area!

Mac email, calendar, and address book users needed for usability study in San Francisco Bay Area

My team is in need of Mac users who meet all of the following criteria:

• use their Mac at work for at least 20 hours per week
• use an email application on their Mac (such as Entourage, Mail, webmail, ... )
• use a calendar application on their Mac (such as Entourage, iCal, or a web-based calendar)
• use an address book application on their Mac (such as Entourage, Address Book, or a web-based contact manager)
• live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and are available the week of 22 June 2009 for a 2-hour usability study in Mountain View

If this describes you, please email uccoord (at) microsoft (dot) com with "Mac" in the subject line.

If you're a Mac user but don't meet all of these criteria, my team is conducting lots of research in the upcoming months. The majority of our research is conducted in either the Puget Sound or San Francisco Bay areas, although we do travel around the US and around the world to meet users in other locations. You can sign up to be notified about future Mac studies in your area here.

Edited on 6/17/2009 at 6pm: I now have all of the participants that I need for this study.  You can still sign up to be notified about future Mac studies in your area at the link above!

Office:Mac 2008 12.1.9 and Office:Mac 2004 11.5.5 now available

Today, we have released updates for Office:Mac 2008 and Office:Mac 2004.

Office:Mac 2008 update 12.1.9 contains fixes for security vulnerabilities. Additionally, it readies the Office 2008 suite for the upcoming official release of the Entourage Web Services addition, and must be installed before the final release of that application. 12.1.9 is a combo updater; you only need to have Office 12.1 installed first.  For those users who are using the public beta of Entourage Web Services, you should continue to use 12.1.5 and not install this update. Full details about this update are available in our Knowledge Base article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971822Description of the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.9 Update.

Office:Mac 2004 update 11.5.5 also contains fixes for security vulnerabilities. Full details about this update are available in our Knowledge Base article Description of the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.5 Update.

To download the latest and greatest, you can either fire up Microsoft AutoUpdate (in any Office app, go to the Help menu and select "Check for Updates") or download it manually from Mactopia.

Edited on 12 June 2009 at 12:30pm to add in links to KB articles and to specify that 12.1.9 is a combo updater.

Q&A: Why doesn't Hotmail work with Entourage:Mac now?

I got the following question about Hotmail and Entourage:

Using Entourage on an iMac. Suddenly Hotmail account doesn't want to work anymore. Saw your post regarding POP3 coming soon. Will that fix this problem?

Earlier this year, Hotmail made free POP access available for all users. This is part of their effort to remove WebDAV support in Hotmail. WebDAV is how Entourage currently gets mail from Hotmail.

If you see that Entourage suddenly isn't getting your Hotmail anymore, the fix is pretty easy. You just need to create a new account in Entourage for your Hotmail that uses POP. The Entourage MVPs have directions to set up Hotmail in Entourage as a POP account, and we've got an Entourage help topic that describes how to set up a Hotmail account too.

Q&A: why don't new events created on my iPhone show up in Entourage?

I got a question about using Sync Services on Entourage 2008 with an iPhone:

I have trouble synching my iPhone and the calendar feature. For some reason it does not always work very well. Things I write on the phone never make it to my calendar on my Mac. Any thoughts?

Make sure that your iPhone is writing to the correct calendar. For the items to show up in Entourage, the new events that you add to your iPhone must be written to the calendar named "Entourage". To check this, open up iTunes when you have your iPhone connected to it. Then select the your iPhone, and select the "Info" tab. Under "Calendar", select the calendar named "Entourage", and then select to put new events in the "Entourage" calendar.

If you never use iCal, you can take this one step further. Open up iCal. You'll see an Entourage calendar in there, and it has all of your Entourage calendar events in there. iCal also has a couple of default calendars. You can delete those calendars by clicking on them in the "Calendars" list on the left side and hitting delete. Then there won't be any other place for your new events created on your iPhone to go.

If you're interested in the gory technical details of how Entourage syncs with your mobile devices, one of my colleagues wrote an essay about it, which the Entourage MVPs kindly have posted on their site: basics of how Sync Services works.

You can sync your supported mobile device with Entourage 2004 (11.2.3 or later), Entourage 2008, or Entourage for Exchange Web Services. I covered the basics of syncing your device with Entourage in an earlier blog post: Q&A: How do I sync from Entourage to my iPhone?

Exchange 2010 webcast series

My colleagues over on the Exchange team are doing a series of webcasts about Exchange 2010. For you IT folks who are using (or considering switching to) Exchange, there's some great information about what's coming in the next version. Most of the content isn't relevant for end users, although maybe the session about Outlook Web Access might be of interest.

The webcasts start at 9am (PDT) on 01 June 2009, and run throughout the month. Check them out, and don't forget to leave feedback about the sessions in the Exchange blog!

Q&A: other MacBU blogs

Another question today ...

Do any of your colleagues in the Mac BU have additional blogs that I haven't come across?

Well, I can't speak to what blogs you've come across already, so let's do a list of them.

• Mac Mojo is the official blog of MacBU. Everyone here in MacBU is pretty heads-down working on getting lots of stuff out the door this year, so that blog has been kinda quiet lately. Look there for big announcements from us, as well as tips and tricks for better working with Office.
• Gavin Shearer is a Program Manager for Excel:Mac. His blog tends more towards his other passions, such as all things Disney and the Seattle Storm, but he does occasionally post about Microsoft and MacBU. Most of his Excel-centric stuff gets posted to Mac Mojo instead.
• Schwieb (yes, that's what we all call him) is one of our senior developers. While he doesn't post frequently, his posts are very important. The two blog posts that I link to the most are his: risks and rewards (which discusses, amongst other things, the issue with Office 2008 and Spaces in Leopard) and saying hello (again) to Visual Basic (in which we announced that Visual Basic is returning to the next version of Office:Mac). He's got other greatest hits as well, but those are the ones that I find myself needing to refer people to over and over again.
• Rick Schaut is another one of our most senior developers, not to mention all-around awesome guy. He's been quiet about posting lately, too, but the archives of his blog have all sorts of deep dark dirty technical details, as well as lots of historical information about what we've done and why.

There are a few other blogs around as well, but they're mostly all defunct. I didn't list any blogs that hadn't been updated in the past 18 months or that only consisted of automated postings (Twitter, bookmarks, etc).

Q&A: why does the Messenger:Mac window lose focus after I send my message?

I got this question today, and realised that I hadn't mentioned it here on this blog yet. The question is as follows:

i have just downloaded the new safari 4 beta. whenever i type something into msn, and press enter, i have to click back in the text box when i want to type my next message. this is very annoying

Yes, that is annoying! It's an issue with the version of WebKit that Apple shipped with the Safari 4 public beta. This issue was reported pretty much immediately after the Safari 4 public beta hit the streets, and the WebKit team fixed it quite quickly. To quote from their bug tracking system, this is the bug that was in WebKit:

During a series of firstResponder changes, at some point while the WebHTMLView was losing first responder status, we incorrectly marked the page as active, and then when the WebHTMLView became first responder again, setActive did nothing. This change restores behavior from before r36919 to check if the WebHTMLView is in the middle of losing first responder when calling setActive.

So what do you do? You have a few options, none of which are optimal.

1. Uninstall the Safari 4 beta (use the uninstaller that came with the DMG; if you don't still have it, you can redownload the Safari 4 beta to get the uninstaller), and reinstall Safari 3.
2. Install a later build of WebKit. The Apple Developer Connection article working with the WebKit nightly builds is a great overview of what you need to do here. This obviously isn't for the faint-of-heart, so you need to be very comfortable with living on the bleeding edge of software development.
3. Live with it until Apple releases an update to Safari 4 that uses a newer build of WebKit.

The first option is the one that I went with. I use Messenger much too much to be able to live with it, and I didn't feel like dealing with nightly builds of WebKit. I'm already using nightly builds of Entourage for EWS, not to mention [redacted] and [redacted], so I didn't want to add more complexity.

Edited 2009-05-26 at 16:09 to link to the ADC article.

your security questions might not be that secure

I've whinged about the security questions that my bank asks me: mother's maiden name, pet's name, city of birth, etc. Some of my colleagues here at Microsoft (along with some folks from CMU) have written a paper about how easy it is to guess the correct answers to these security questions, and are presenting that paper at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy this week. Technology Review has an article about their paper: Are Your "Secret Questions" Too Easily Answered?.

The findings from this paper are somewhat unsurprising, although the actual numbers did surprise me. Here's one quote from the Technology Review article:

The least-secure questions are simple ones whose answers can be guessed with no existing knowledge of the subject, the researchers say. For example, the answers to the questions "What is your favorite town?" and "What is your favorite sports team?" were relatively easy for participants to guess. All told, 30 percent and 57 percent of the correct answers, respectively, appeared in the top-five list of guesses.

57% of the correct answers, all without knowing me! Even worse, there's the likelihood that I'm going to forget my own answers. Here's another quote from the Technology Review article:

Even for the most memorable questions--Yahoo's, as it turned out--the participants forgot 16 percent of the answers within three to six months. Overall, one out of every five people forgot all of the answers to their secret questions, the researchers found.

Bruce Schneier, who I'm willing to call a computer security god, says that he simply types in a random answer to these questions and, should he forget his password, calls the company for a reset instead of relying on this service. I wish that this were sufficient. My bank occasionally asks me the answers to my questions if it thinks that I'm logging in from somewhere else or if it thinks I'm engaging in out-of-the-ordinary behaviour. Given that I have three computers at work and four at home, my bank often thinks that I'm logging in from somewhere else and I'm stuck answering the questions.

new members of the family

My home network has seen three changes lately.

The first, which I've been wanting to do for ages but hadn't quite gotten 'round to yet, is a new Mac Mini. My old Mini, the last of the PowerPC minis, was my media server. It was hooked up to a pile of external drives, which housed my ever-growing iTunes library and some video. On my old Mini, iTunes was taking more than five minutes to launch. New Mini? It launches instantly. I can also run the iTunes cover art screensaver, which ground my poor old Mini to a halt. Oh, and Front Row is quite nifty, and there are some unsupported third-party plug-ins for it which make it even more useful. I can't believe I waited this long to upgrade. I had been watching my Netflix queue through my Xbox, but now that I've got a Mini that can actually run Silverlight, I wonder if I'll find myself using it instead of the Xbox.

The second change is a NAS, specifically the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer Edition. The pile of external drives hooked up to the old Mini was okay, but it meant that we didn't have backups of any of it. The idea of having to recreate my iTunes library brought tears to my eyes. Plus I had to manually back up the other machines in the house, and let's be honest that manual backups are undone backups. There are three drives in the NAS right now, giving me a total of 2.75TB of storage. It now houses the iTunes library, which the Mini accesses over the network, and the Xbox can access it via streaming too. Now it's set up to be the target for laptop backups for Time Machine.

Finally, I've gone to gigabit Ethernet throughout the home (except for my ancient lampshade iMac, which doesn't support gigabit). It's immensely faster.

What changes to the home network are on the horizon? Well, the day before the NAS arrived, my old MacBook hard drive died a horrid death. Short of replacing the heads, which is officially not cheap, I lost a whole lot of data. So since my MacBook now has a virgin install of Leopard on it, I'm considering selling it and replacing it with a shiny new iMac (just in time for the summer Mac release of Sims 3!). After that, I think that the home network will be unchanged for some time (barring a massive hardware failure, knock on wood ... ).