(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Dear Apple Design Assholes:

Just because your mail program *can* read an attachment, and *can* put that attachment to be viewed in the body of an email, this does not mean that it SHOULD do so. However, doing so is harmless - as long as you remember that this is an ATTACHMENT and hence it was probably meant to be saveable SEPARATELY FROM THE MESSAGE.

When I have to go back and zip up and resend a .csv file because not only did you display it inline but you actively prevented the end user from saving it back out as the CSV file? You suck.

No love,
Me.

Comments

[hoopajoop.livejournal.com]

*Fist in air*

[elffin.livejournal.com]

Was this Apple's "Mail" program? (I've never used it, and so have never had to deal with any fail on its' part.)

[zastrazzi.livejournal.com]

Wait, what? Mail.app displays the attachment file name(s) etc in the same spot Outlook does. It also provides quicklook to display it inline, the size of the attachment, number of attachments, and a quick save button.

What part of that was hard for the user? I've never had a problem saving docs, pdfs, csv or anything else I've received via email.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I was standing behind him. An email with no body text and a .csv attachment was not detected as an attachment. It was not saveable as an attachment. The "attachments" entry in the menu was greyed out.

I was not impressed.

[zastrazzi.livejournal.com]

No idea, but that's not the default or usual way for Mail.app to deal with an email attachment. Either the user (or the admin of their system) did something odd and broke it, or Mail.app itself is broken on their system and needs to be reinstalled.

Not a design issue though.

[mhoye.livejournal.com]

Or the sending app pasted it in, rather than attaching it.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Sending app (thunderbird)'s got it correctly as an attachment. Other recipients use Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003, both see the attachment correctly.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

This is probably csv specific then. Which doesn't make any sense, but then again bugs rarely do.

[zastrazzi.livejournal.com]

I'd have to say nope, not csv related. I've emailed myself a couple csv files just now to confirm. Mail.app handles them as it should.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm willing to believe that the user has fucked up his options.

However, when neither he nor I can find a way to "display attached files as attachments and not part of the email" in 5 minutes of looking? YET ANOTHER UI FAILURE.

[sola.livejournal.com]

Just what i was going to say, Or, IIRC, you can just option-click on it. I have to admit, i'm confused by this one.