Can someone at #Microsoft be kind enough to remind us again of the reason why, in #macOS, when you quit and relaunch #Word, it refuses to remember which documents were opened and to reopen them automatically, even though the “Close windows when quitting an application” option is NOT enabled in System Settings?
@betalogue personally, I feel ~half of the blame is with Apple.
The state restoration APIs are terrible. (MS could have rolled their own though)
This was rolled out in 10.7 with other document lifecycle changes (versions, auto-save) that were half-baked, marginally improved in 10.8, and never touched again.
Apple never evangelized/worked with devs to get on board
Sadly MS's lack of adoption of these has caused all of macOS inconsistency and added to my own app support costs >_<.
@jmfd I’ve heard this before. However, I use a variety of apps and, if the APIs are indeed terrible, then clearly all those other developers have made the extra effort required to make restoration work, in spite of Apple’s lack of support. Microsoft is the outlier here.
I am not excusing Apple here. My readers know I have plenty to say about the poor quality of their software products. It just feels like Microsoft doesn’t care. (Same thing with Adobe, unsurprisingly.)
@betalogue I'd also say while some 10.7 document features are confusing... restoration is... a nice and obvious win? :)
I rolled my own, anyhow.
There was a nice time when Microsoft/Adobe would lean into platform-specific paradigms, but I suspect that is past with nearly all developers who have cross-platform apps.
It is probably more cost-effective that apps behave the same across different platforms.
OS features matter less in a world where users spend their time in the browser :(.
@jmfd My (long) experience with Adobe and Microsoft is that they never really embraced platform-specific standards and conventions. E.g., Acrobat Reader STILL doesn’t support double-click-and-drag for word-by-word selection.
I can do without most Adobe products these days (except for Acrobat Reader, sadly), but my work forces me to continue using Office. Hence my never-ending frustration. How can Microsoft not realize that restoration is an important feature for users?
@jmfd Quitting (literally) and relaunching is often needed due to OTHER bugs and flaws (when it’s not forced by a freeze or crash). So the user gets “punished” twice: once by the bug that forced him to quit, and a second time by the fact that Word doesn’t restore properly after the relaunch. (1/3)
As for the figurative sense, Microsoft has a stranglehold on office work that makes its products unavoidable. (I use Nisus Writer Pro whenever I can, but I can’t always do that.) (2/3)
As this example demonstrates, that stranglehold on office work is not conducive to innovation or usability improvements. Add to that the fact that Microsoft's big corporate customers are clearly allergic to ANY change (even for the better) and you get the mess we’re in. I am sure those corporate users have to quit and relaunch as often as the rest of us. But they are probably used to it all, and just don’t know any better. (3/3)
@betalogue yup, office has sucked the life out of the high end of the market. The low end, where a newcomer could begin with a new product, is crushed by google docs and pages being free.
Any new entrant would need a drastically different product AND a different business model. Then they still need a lot of skill/strategy to be able to try to push into businesses.
@jmfd In many respects, Nisus Writer Pro is exactly what Microsoft Word should be. It is more powerful than Word, while also being leaner and faster. (It is, however, limited in its level of Office compatibility by what the open-source conversion filters can do, hence my need to still use Word.) But there is no pressure on Microsoft to compete with Nisus, because they effectively operate in different spheres altogether. And one-man shops are always highly vulnerable.
@betalogue Nisus Writer goes back to 1989 🤯. It is great it has survived that long, though I'd be curious on the author's perspective on how to grow in the word processing market. It seems one cannot compete on features alone.
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