2007 / April 21st/ Apple needs force Microsoft to recall Outlook 2007
Apple is in a unique position right now. Last year, at WWDC, Steve Jobs gave a sneak peak of the upcoming update to OSX, Leopard. Part of this demo was something called Stationery for Mail. For the most of us geeks, this won’t be too awesome of a feature, but to the general public, this is a great way to combine photos and pre-built templates to show off something cool to their relatives. I’ve played around with Leopard a bit, and stationary and it’s a cool feature. One of those neato Mac features you can show off to your friends — like Photobooth effects.
But it’s not going to work out so well. You see, at the time Steve demoed this feature, everything was working perfectly. But then Microsoft threw a big wrench in the works. Microsoft changed the rendering engine for Outlook 2007. Outlook will now use Word’s renderer instead of Internet Explorer. Microsoft pulled a typical move and refused to budge, amidst the adamant protest by developers around the world.
Why won’t it work?
It won’t work simply because of one little CSS attribute that’s not supported. That’s background-image. If you take a look at Campaign Monitor’s excellent 2007 guide to CSS email support, you’ll notice that Outlook 2007 no longer supports background-image.
That’s a pretty crucial attribute. That means no textures behind text. So let’s look at a typical Stationary from Apple’s Stationery gallery.
Notice the awesome texture behind the text? Notice how they can’t possibly make this work in Outlook 2007 without completely redesigning the template?
Grow some brass, Apple
So Apple has a few courses of action at this point:
- Suck it up and redesign the suite of templates without background-images.
- Cancel the feature.
- Cancel the feature and call out Microsoft as the reason for this.
I pick #3. Apple, you should cancel the feature — it’s not a critical feature that people will be mad about. But it’s important enough to get the general public angry at Microsoft. And it’s not really deceit either. It’s all truthful. Perhaps a bit distorted, but nothing dishonest in it.
I’ll be watching Apple’s moves and see what they decide to do about this whole dilemma.
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April 21st | #
I think there’s another option. Leave them how they are with background-images, they just won’t display correctly in Outlook 2007. If Outlook users care, they’ll switch to Thunderbird or something similar. It’s not Apple’s fault that Microsoft have made a stupid decision, they shouldn’t have to change their actions because of it.
April 22nd | #
I agree. I’ll rue the day that Microsoft’s amazing incompetence can actually hinder the efforts of a wonderful software developer like Apple.
April 22nd | #
I pick option #4, Apple doesn’t cancel the feature and it works on all Macs and email clients that support enough CSS to see background images.
It’s ridiculous to think Apple should make the decision to cancel features based on Microsoft’s decisions. What Apple should do, and probably will do, is continue to innovate the computer world with OS X despite what Microsoft does .
The rationale you offered would be comparable to web developers not pushing ahead with web standards because Internet Explorer doesn’t support CSS correctly. We would still be in the dark ages if we waited around for Microsoft to fully support CSS. They noticed the uproar, and Microsoft is now (at least trying) to fully support CSS and brought in molly as an advisor.
April 22nd | #
Jim/Chris: The difference is that us web developers don’t discount IE7 completely because it doesn’t support CSS enough for our likings. The dark truth is that Outlook is by far the most popular desktop email client, and has an enormous saturation point (something around 95%) in corporate settings.
We both know that if Apple were to leave this flaw in the templates, Apple would be blamed — not Microsoft. We’ve got to keep in mind that we’re trying to change the public’s perspective; a perspective not parallel to ours.
April 22nd | #
What a completely ridiculous article, why on earth should Apple change their templates for Microsofts Flaw. It wont just be Apple’s emails that get broken by the “new” ahem, rendering engine for outlook, its going to be all of the big players who send out html emails with a background image/repeat/position property assigned.
Look, if it was just Apple’s emails that are going to break then I’m pretty sure Apple would re-consider so to not look bad.. But its NOT, its every freaking email newsletter out there from the big guys that is going to mess up… Lets take for example, amazon/ebay/msn/microsofts own emails… they all use these properties.
Hmmm i very much doubt when people start to find their emails look funky they’ll blame the sender.. it will be “piece of shit software messing up my email”…. boom, another reason to switch to mac or at least try to downgrade away from outlook 07′.
April 22nd | #
I hate Outlook 2007. It’s an abomination. I can’t think of another example where an UPGRADE performed worse than its predecessors… oh wait, there’s always Vista… nevermind.
Apple’s not really in a position to tell Microsoft to do anything. Outlook 2007 is designed for a different kind of user. Do I like that HTML rendering is fuX0r3d in Outlook 2007? Hell no! It makes my job a lot harder. But if you think Apple’s in a position to demand anything, especially this ridiculous, from Microsoft – I’ve got some swampland to sell ya.
April 22nd | #
Just for the record, the word you are looking for is Stationery (with an “E”). Stationary (with an “A”) is something that does not move.
This is a common error and no big deal, but it was bugging me. ;-) Remember it like my gradeschool teacher taught me…the “E” means envelope. I still remember after all these years!
I also favor option 4–keep it and call out MS as being non-standard.
April 22nd | #
And a cAr can remain stationAry.
April 22nd | #
I also propose a “stay†in the feature set. This could be one more reason (in addition to the many others) to lure Windows users to the Apple Macintosh platform, once they find out about it.
April 22nd | #
Actually, most professionally designed email templates are 100% images. CSS newsletters are only for the geeks in the crowd. So again — most templates will continue to work. It’s people like Apple that are pushing the boundaries and making unique templates with text.
Remember, sometimes it’s hard to move outside our little bubble. The rest of the professional web isn’t on the standards bandwagon for newsletters.
April 23rd | #
You’ve got to ask yourself why MS would yank that feature, PC people have been using it on their PC’s for sometime now, you would think even the PC community is going to be a bit upset at this as-well? Not just the Apple community.
http://www.switchingtomac.com/
April 24th | #
Personally I think it’s great that Microsoft have removed this functionality. My email client is not a web browser and I don’t want to receive web pages for emails.
Yeah I can see how lots of people would find this stationary thing cool. And so I suppose a better feature would be to allow the Outlook 2007 user the ability to set which styles to render and which to ignore. I would have nearly everything switched off so that no stationary abominations arrive in my inbox.
April 24th | #
I wish I had spelt ’stationery’ correctly.
April 24th | #
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April 24th | #
[...] beiliegt, wird die elektronischen Grüße nicht vollständig darstellen können. Darauf macht das Blog Warpspire aufmerksam: Apples Vorlagen setzten auf CSS-Stylesheets, von denen Outlook 2007 nur einen Teil [...]
April 24th | #
I think Apple will include stationery as it is shown in the beta releases. But my guess is that they will also have a talk with Microsoft in order to implement the different background options – it’s for the benefit of everybody! Hopefully there will be an update for outlook 2007 – et voila – stationery emails will be rendered perfectly :-) … and outlook emails suddenly will have a similar template system called “notepaper” ;-)
April 25th | #
Microsoft have had stationery type emails for years. This is why I was kind of dissapointed that Apple were doing something similar and then sticking it on their front page leopard preview.
April 25th | #
Well, the thing is: What if Apple isn’t using CSS to render the whole stationery. What if, in fact, the only thing rendered by CSS is the background image, and the rest is purely tables and raw images?
Then, the Microsoft-users would still get the stationary, though not the texture below the text, Web standards would loose out, and we would all die a little inside.
Hoping that’s not the case, but looking at what the different kinds of email-clients support, that seems to be the logical route for Apple to take.
I know we all want Apple to take option #3, and take on all the rest of the world in a huge battle for Web Standards (with capitals) and win out — but…
April 26th | #
Twisted: This isn’t a matter of CSS. You can’t render background images period. Not through tables, not through hard-coding, nothing.
May 1st | #
This is an area where Microsoft totally defines reality. If you know that your recipients are on a mac or gmail or something, go nuts with the background images.
But you really shouldn’t have to know or care what email reader anyone is using.
If the templates don’t work in at least 60% of the email readers, there’s no point in having them in the first place.
I’m still hoping that Outlook 2007 will get an update to support background-image.
August 9th | #
I am also one of the few people here who strongly approve of Microsoft’s decision to do this. I don’t want my email reader to treat emails as web pages, I don’t want Outlook doing ‘useful’ things like running VBScript, and in any case I don’t much care about these sorts of newsletters as they go straight into the Junk Email folder where they belong.
As for people who send mail with stationary… think about it, Outlook 2007 is a business application. It’s not for your grandma who likes sending some prettily formatted message through email, with digital flowers and music playing and so on. For the vast Outlook userbase therefore, there will be no noticable effect. And I feel safe reading my mail as a consequence, knowing I won’t get bitten by some in-HTML script that Microsoft hadn’t thought of yet.
November 6th | #
I’m going to guess it’s some sort of problem with Outlook’s interior security.
Miscrosoft in the past has had several serious security problems with its image decoders (you could craft a corrupted PNG or JPEG in such a way that it would overwrite executable code in memory when it tried to decode it… code to do things like, say, enable the Telnet server or clear your Administrator password). I don’t have the info at my fingertips, but there may have been such a latent bug in the CSS engine in Outlook which was not present in the IE CSS engine (two separate engines, two separate sets of exploits). Rather than fix it in Outlook, they may have just said “screw it, use IE’s engine even though it’s missing a few things”.
The above is pure speculation, but it’s the kind of thing that can lead to decisions like this.
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by Windows’ poor security model.
May 8th | #
Evidently there are many self proclaimed experts on here who have only discerned stationary to be little teddy bears and flowers and crap all over the page. Common business sense tells business people that stationary is the equivalent of corporate letterhead. This function should be easy to accomplish using html and not using word’s horrible bloated code rendering and editing. Microsoft has only made things worse and less universal with this extremely disappointing and cheesy new implementation direction.
February 20 | #
There are a lot of clueless comments here. Kyle in particular is invincibly ignorant claiming most professionally designed email newsletters are images. I would say that there are a few clueless designers out there who don’t understand electronic media and there lack of mental agility leads them to try and force everything into a print mentality.
But I was particularly shocked that not a single person even bothered to mention why Microsoft did this. In Outlook 2003 and before when you authored an HTML email in Outlook it used the Word rendering engine. When you viewed that email it used the IE (trident) engine. Microsoft decided the rendering difference between editing and viewing confounded people so they opted for consistency. Now they did half the right thing. They should have got the Word engine to a point where you could do things like float and background images. And I don’t see much excuse for it not being there.
February 26th | #
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