Been using Microsoft Outlook at work. Not impressed. Strangely, their html email formatting isn't bad at all but their plain text stinks. Lines are wrapped without any regard for what comes next, and spellcheck for some reason can't figure out what's been quoted and what hasn't when you use a quoting prefix. Not to mention the "---------Original Message---------" header for each line used to cause me trouble with my trialware app!

It's a shame MS can't get something this simple right. Mozilla certainly seems to. Maybe MS should steal some of the MPL'd code.

I wrote a quick VB app to quote text for emails in some spare time last week. Hopefully I'll turn that into something Outlook can use soon.

My other comment -- and you'll have to infer what I really think -- is that I'm not real impressed with the quality of some corporate-level software. At work, we use a number of applications to keep track of time spent on a project, help given, calls to clients, etc. None of them are very impressive, and none strike me as "finished products". Keyboard transversal is lacking in each one, and one looks like it was a hastily slapped together VB6 prototype that the boss used for a little while, saw green when s/he thought about shipping a year or so before a good rewrite would occur, and said, "Ship it!" There is one other piece of software that I've used quite a bit at work, and it too suffers from window focus problems, keyboard transversal glitches (though random sections are done *very* well), and some less-than-straightforward UIs.

Makes me wonder what apps I've seen that are particularly well done. I think Mozilla's browser (especially now that it has type-ahead find) and email programs are quite close to a very well-done set of applications (Composer stinks, and I'm not an IRC fan so I won't comment on Chatzilla). VIm is great, but then only after you've passed ye olde proverbial learning curve, so I really can't count it. I've been impressed with Slypheed-Claws, where you can reset keyboard shortcuts within drop-down menus while you're using them, which is kind of neat. Ultra-Edit is actually quite good for an app that keeps a good Windows look and feel. And I'd been remiss if I didn't say the Windows OS (especially with Windows-E, F, and M and the alt-space R, N, and M(?) combos) and Internet Explorer are well done "apps" from a functional point of view. Windows Explorer itself could use more work, however.

I wish I could say that Apple's iApps, or even Mac OS X, meet my criteria, but the keyboard navigation is pretty shoddy. Very easy to figure out without a manual, very intuitive mouse usage, and usually quite good at doing what they claim to do, but I'm clicking quite a bit more than I'd like.

If you can think of something that's a well-put together application that is easy to use both soley with the mouse and solely with the keyboard, has an easy user interface, and does the job it claims to do well, I'm interested.