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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Free, good looking, fast (so far).. color me impressed. And I access my notes on iOS, Mac, Windows, Windows Phone and Android?

Maybe I'm being idealistic but I'd love to see Microsoft become a truly cross-platform "enterprise-quality" software house. There's tons of great software out there, but rather little that works seamlessly (or even well) across iOS, Android, Windows and the Mac.. and with its resources, inhouse expertise, and no truly successful mobile platform to evangelize, Microsoft seems well placed to take on such a role.

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I would love to see this happen. Right now though, the sheer amount of fighting I do with the Office suite on Mac..

Rant mode on:

Remember how people used to feel about accidentally clicking on PDFs before Adobe cleaned their act up and the better third party readers came along? I'm that way right now with Word and Excel. It takes a full 30-60 seconds to spin up and actually render the damn paperwork, sometimes it's not that big a deal if I can make it to the dock and hit force quit before too much time has passed.

Outlook is downright execerable. The search feature simply does not work the majority of the time. I can be looking at a subject line, key that subject into the field, and the messages don't appear.

I have to do a monthly-ish database rebuild or else I get non-stop "failed to save" error messages regarding appointments.

Mail.app might be pretty spartan and have it's rough edges, but dammit, the basic functionality works without being babysat!

This is basically the same as on the PC – Microsoft has shown a few signs of changing their internal culture but for a long time they apparently prioritized new features over improvements to existing features, which meant that most of the bugs / UI mistakes I remembered from Office 2000 (or even 97!) are still present in the current version. Something like switching to asynchronous networking would make daily life better for millions of customers but no PM wants to lead a release with “UI freezes less frequently”

Re: Outlook search

I have to search multiple times to get any results, with the bonus that a single MOC conversation will show up as multiple, separate entries for every time it was saved.

Also the search starts from the oldest mail onwards, which is really handy when I need to find something that was sent to me a month ago. And my mailbox has over 4 years of mails in it...

Microsoft would benefit from a separate division of small groups making stuff that's simple and "just works," then expand the company into the new products, as Macintosh grew from Apple. Right now, Apple is vulnerable in this regard.

Can I access through a web browser? And from my Linux desktop?

Yeah, full editing through the browser, with semi-live sync to the client (I'm seeing a maybe 20 second lag?)

full editing is a stretch. Or, put another way, -you get "fuller" editing in the full OneNote package ;-)

You can access it via Office Online... go to onenote.com

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