Tag Archives: microsoft

Microsoft isn’t totally evil

[Pierre Igot][igot] complains about the font rendering on [Microsoft’s Office for Mac][macoffice] product pages:

> [Why does the web site promoting Microsoft Office for Mac OS X use, by default, a font that no Mac OS X user has on his or her system?][complain]

Well, the branding for Mac Office uses Segoe so it makes sense to keep that brand consistent across all the pages. But it was more of a rhetorical question, wasn’t it?

But Pierre has missed that the text is not displayed using a font specified by the stylesheet (he notes that he doesn’t have Segoe installed). What actually happens is it is rendered as canvas elements, one for each word.

This works using a JavaScript library called [Cufón][cufon] which aims to allow text to be rendered using any font the designer specifies, even if the font is not installed on the visitor’s computer. In the good old days the text would have been rendered as a graphic (as the designer did for the ‘Office:mac’ logo at the top of the page) but modern Web designers are too cool for that.

The advantage of the crazy download-able fonts and client-side JavaScript approach is the headline text remains accessible, you can copy and paste it etc. And at larger sizes it looks pretty good; only the smaller headline text renders poorly.

This screenshot shows how well it works for large size text and poorly for the small text (taken in Google Chrome dev version). I’ve selected part of the text to demonstrate that it is “live”:

Screenshot of Microsoft's Mac site

Pierre is right, the smaller headline text does look terrible for the very same visitors Microsoft wants to sell to. But I don’t mind too much because the whole site is much less of a useability nightmare since the re-design. Microsoft’s Mac Web designers aren’t entirely evil.

[cufon]: http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/
[igot]: http://www.betalogue.com
[complain]: http://www.betalogue.com/2011/02/10/microsoft-segoe/
[macoffice]: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/

Office 2008 update includes Entourage EWS

Not that the [release notes have any mention of it][1], but the [Microsoft Office 2008 12.2.5][2] update will also install the latest [Entourage EWS 13.0.5][3] if you had it on your hard disk already (else you get vanilla Entourage updated). You only need to install the stand-alone update if this is the first time you are installing the Exchange Web Services version of Entourage.

Microsoft’s Mac installers are good, but unnecessarily complicated. And the design of the [Mactopia website][4] drives me up the wall – tiny little scrolling `

` blocks and javascript hyperlinks makes it difficult to read the information and difficult to link straight to an update.

[1]: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028864
[2]: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx?pid=Mactopia_Office2008&fid=D46255BD-6470-4106-9FE2-EA67ACD3F1BD
[3]: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx?pid=Mactopia_Office2008&fid=EC991D3B-6B25-41C3-9119-D0E6985F2FC1
[4]: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/

Microsoft Update versus Internet Explorer 8

Fun implications of designing [your software update service][msupdate] as a pseudo-application that is actually an ActiveX plugin (that needs to guarantee the owning web page cannot be closed) include refusing to allow _any_ web page to come forward when the owning web page is one of many tabs in Internet Explorer 8.

It is a little satisfying seeing Microsoft’s chickens come home to roost, but I would much rather they hadn’t made such obvious, Web-hostile choices in the first place.

[msupdate]: http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate/v6/default.aspx