Gmail vs Outlook.com

I try not to judge any new tool or platform before giving it a thorough run for its money (and I love trying out new things, pretty much all the time). That was the case with Outlook.com, launched back in February 2013. I signed up pretty much the same day it became publicly available. That means I’ve been using it for just about 4 months now.

Some of the stuff I really like about Outlook.com: You can turn all the social stuff off. If you just want a pure email client, no Twitter or Facebook or Google+ prompts everywhere, Outlook is great at that. I like the way downloads within an email are presented, and the clean interface as compared to Gmail. There’s much less stuff on the screen, period.

A screenshot from my personal outlook.com account

Importing all my mail from Gmail to Outlook.com was a relatively painless experience, although the search does leave a little to be desired. The mobile apps, to be honest, are not great. Outlook.com on my Android keeps logging itself out, and is just barely usable. Outlook.com offers integrated IM with MSN (presumably Skype, too), Facebook and Google, all from the web interface, which is a nice touch.

Not having to deal with ads in Outlook.com is also a nice touch, although far from a dealbreaker. The People, Calendar and Skydrive systems follow the same design pattern as Windows 8 itself – which must be great for change-averse technophobes (possibly Microsoft’s target audience).

I’m quite enjoying Skydrive, too – it’s nice not having to convert Office documents into Google format before being able to edit them (or at least, severely mangled versions of them). Their storage upgrade options are also very cheap, only costing R84/year for 20gb of storage, although the entire stack (service, desktop and mobile app) feels much more unresponsive when compared to, say, Dropbox.

Possibly my biggest annoyance (and this may well be a bug, but it has remained unfixed for over a year now), is with multiple email addresses. I signed up with wogan@hotmail.co.za while Outlook.com was in Preview, and when they introduced @outlook.com aliases I grabbed wogan@outlook.com. It took them a few more months to allow logins with @outlook.com addresses, which is fine – now, it seems to randomly select a From: address on every mail I compose, and occasionally it just loses an entire address, meaning I need to log out and back in again.

So why even bother with the competition? Gmail got annoying for several reasons, one of them being the absolute persistence with pushing Google+. I get that Google has a singular vision for what social networking and interpersonal communication should look like, but I’m not particularly in favour of having that constantly thrown at me when I’m just trying to go about the business of sending and receiving email.

Another big reason was the assumption (possibly naive) that having an end-to-end Microsoft personal tech stack would make things easier. Windows 8 on your desktop, Windows 8 on your phone, your Xbox in the living room, an Outlook.com address in the cloud. Everyone speaking the same language.

As it turns out, it’s not that simple. “Sprawling” would be a good word to describe Microsoft’s  tech teams. “Disjointed” is another. The people working on the OS are almost never talking to the people working on the web apps, who aren’t talking to the mobile app developers, who aren’t talking to the Xbox division. Or, at least, that’s what it looks like to me.

Given the feature disparity, overlap, and general not-fitting-togetherness of all the Microsoft solutions currently available, they may as well have been cobbled together from a handful of open-source projects.

The mobile Outlook.com app can’t do everything that the web app can do, and the Outlook.com web app is entirely different to the (far more sophisticated) Outlook Web App, which is used as a frontend for the Exchange 2013 server (which, sadly, doesn’t have a mobile app).

Skydrive has at least 4 different versions with apps that don’t interoperate (you can’t log in to your company Skydrive using your personal Skydrive app). You actually need 2 different desktop Skydrive apps installed to talk to the personal and corporate clouds respectively, and the corporate cloud doesn’t even have a mobile app out yet. This is of course not to be confused with the Skydrive Metro app, which is for personal accounts only, or with Skydrive, which is what Sharepoint 2013 refers to your personal cloud storage space within your company.

You can add your Microsoft account to Windows 8, to use the built-in Mail, People and Calendar Metro apps, which doesn’t connect at all to (the far, far more powerful) Outlook for Desktop, which is a program you get if you pay for the personal Office 365 cloud, not to be confused with the corporate Office 365 cloud.

You can install Skype, but that requires a Microsoft account, and lets you talk to your Skype and (old) MSN friends. You can’t sign into Skype with a corporate Microsoft account, since that is what Lync is for, although Lync has a limited federation with Skype. I haven’t yet figured out how to connect my Xbox to Skype, but at this point I’m not remotely interested.

Google faces much the same challenge, when it comes to various departments and teams that don’t really talk to eachother, but they’ve actually managed to identify a spearhead (Google+) around which to focus all of their other services, and the impression I’ve been getting over the last few months is that the new features are playing together much better.

In due time I’ll probably find myself back in the Google environment. I’m (hopefully) getting a Samsung Galaxy S4 in the near future, and given the relative coherency of Google’s offering, I’d rather switch back to that, than deal with the Microsoft solution disparity.

It may also have something to do with my steadily-declining faith in Microsoft’s ability to retain market leadership, though that’s a topic for a separate discussion entirely.

How to use nested arrays in CodeIgniter’s XML-RPC feature

This one drove me up the wall, thanks mostly to misleading documentation.

As of version 2.1.3, the following will work for sending a flat array as a response:

$flatArray = array(
array(
'myboolean' => true,
'mystring' => 'cheese'),
'struct'
);

return $this->xmlrpc->send_response($flatArray);

And this will work for a nested arrays:

$nestedArray = array(
array(
'myarray' => array( array('key1' => 'value1', 'key2' => 'value2'), 'struct' ),
'mystring' => 'muffins',
'myboolean' => false),
'struct'
);

return $this->xmlrpc->send_response($nestedArray);

Ironically enough, the sample array in the documentation fails outright.

Resolved: Steam install error 1327 – Invalid Drive

Short answer: If Steam is complaining about an invalid drive, you can either try the recommended fix (here, involves registry keys), or, find a flashdrive, plug it in, and use the “Create and format disk partitions” (Windows 8) or “Disk Management” under Administrative Tools (Windows 7) to assign the missing drive letter to the flashdrive.

When the MSI detects no Steam install in that location, it’ll prompt you to start from scratch.

Disabling adaptive brightness on HP Elitebook 8570p

I’ve seen a few forum complaints, but no posted solutions to this. The later HP notebooks have this supremely annoying adaptive brightness feature – when it’s off AC power, the screen contrast, brightness and gamma auto-adjust depending on what’s being displayed. So from one browser tab to the next, everything shifts, and leaves subtle gradients completely unreadable.

Turns out it’s actually not HP’s fault – ATI has this annoying thing called “Powerplay” that “Maximizes Battery Life” when enabled. To disable, edit the advanced power plan settings (I use Windows 8, so just search for “Edit power plan” under Settings):

Lessons on teamwork and co-operation

Actually I just grabbed a few random Saints Row The Third videos. Man, I love those VTOLs.

Stupid Far Cry 2

Heard a lot about the Far Cry series, and I picked up a copy of Far Cry 2 during the week. Decided to play it this evening, and I’m not sure I’m gonna get past the first 10 minutes.

Just look at the vast, rich wilderness I’m not allowed to explore!

I’m a big fan of the Strike Back series (both seasons). If you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty much like watching a series born out of Call of Duty. Lots of gun fights in some pretty decent locations, moody military briefings, a dash of politics and the occasional one-liner thrown in. Far Cry 2 reminded me of a 2-parter in Season 1 where the main protagonist has to rescue an operative from a prison in Zimbabwe, and consequently trek back to South Africa on foot through jungle territory.

It’s that sort of game – open jungle, you’re a mercenary, you kill people. Or at least you try. After finishing the first two missions I was instructed to go to a particular house and meet a “buddy”. I get there, meet him, and try to leave, but I’m presented with: “You should talk to both buddies before leaving.”.

There’s only two other people in the room, so I talk to each of them in turn, then try going through the door again. “You should talk to both buddies before leaving.”. So I got back, repeatedly hit the Action key, listen to all of them rant on about plot elements I’d love to actually get to, walk back to the door, and “You should talk to both buddies before leaving.”

I guess I’ll be spending my limited gaming hours on Call of Duty, instead, where you don’t get locked in a room on the edge of a lake and are forced to listen to people talk about all the interesting stuff you could be doing.

Brilliant video composite

Some people have all the skills!

Five Hours of Airplane Landings Captured in Thirty Seconds