Friday, May 13, 2016

Office 365 marching backwards in time

Particularly in the Apple ecosystem, users enjoy consistency of software user interfaces. At the company where I work, they have made the unfortunate decision to use Office 365 as an exclusive company wide email/calendaring etc. software suite. I have found Office 365 on the Mac to have poor HID guideline compliance but had noticed some incremental improvements over time that seemed to suggest that Microsoft was on a slow trajectory to create software that could one day integrate comfortably with Mac OS. Then entered 15.22 On the Mac, native applications with embedded text editors near universally utilize one of the few actual fruits of object oriented design (though there may seem to be many when you consider OOP strictly at the operating system API scale): the NSTextView. The NSTextView provides many conveniences to developers, but more importantly, to users. In particular it supports some basic Emacs keybindings to allow you to quickly navigate and delete text a bit more easily. WebView on the Mac also supports similar conveniences, and I have always been frustrated working with WebApps, in particular Jira and Confluence by Atlassian, which have the hubris to intercept and block these keybindings which are normally supported in Safari. Today after updating Microsoft Outlook to version 15.22, these keybindings have vanished. I invoke the image of Linus Torvalds to share appropriate sentiments. I am sure that Linus has gestured similarly to Microsoft before, not just nVidia.