6 years of this bug, and now they're fixing.
Wondering what could've been fixed instead.. 6 years ago emoji symbols weren't as predominant as today, I guess it's more of a marketing bug-fix, indeed.
Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”
#12People call this a bug, I call it an interoperability issue.
Microsoft wanted to represent a real smiley in text without resorting to images. There was no standard unicode character for such a smiley so Microsoft chose a font that did support the smiley character.
Of course hindsight is 20-20, it's easy to say now they should've gone with a character that wasn't in use yet, but circumstances being what they were, a bug is not a completely correct description for what this behavior is.
Re: Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”
#13People call this a bug, I call it an interoperability issue. Microsoft wanted to represent a real smiley in text without resorting to images. There was no standard unicode character for such a smiley so Microsoft chose a font that did support the smiley character. Of course hindsight is 20-20, it's easy to say now they should've gone with a character that wasn't in use yet, but circumstances being what they were, a b…
> People call this a bug, I call it an interoperability issue
Furthermore, it's just a configuration issue. You can change it (it's in the autocorrection settings).
Re: Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”
#14That's what that was!? I aways wondered why some people would end their emails to me with "J". At first I thought it was a typo, then I thought it was just some encoding issue. Never knew I was missing out on smiles.
I always assumed there was some piece of Internet wisdom I didn't that the "J" represented.
Me too. I interpreted it as a smile, but just assumed it was some meme I didn't know about (and couldn't be bothered to look up).
At least I never replied to anyone with an explicit J, as in "Thank you J"
Re: Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”
#15That's what that was!? I aways wondered why some people would end their emails to me with "J". At first I thought it was a typo, then I thought it was just some encoding issue. Never knew I was missing out on smiles.
I'm called James so when I got a "Thanks J", I thought they had taken it on themselves to give me a new nickname. Perhaps signing off my emails with "Thanks :)" gave them sane impression.
Strangely felt better when I realised it was a smiley face.
Re: Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”
#16That's what that was!? I aways wondered why some people would end their emails to me with "J". At first I thought it was a typo, then I thought it was just some encoding issue. Never knew I was missing out on smiles.
I'm called James so when I got a "Thanks J", I thought they had taken it on themselves to give me a new nickname. Perhaps signing off my emails with "Thanks :)" gave them sane impression. Strangely felt better when I realised it was a smiley face.
Me too! Plus everybody calls me "J" or "JJ" because those are my initials and it is universally known that I dislike my name.
Re: Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”
#17Triage report: "Non-critical (P25). No need to worry as this only affects a really small minority of our users. In our user surveys, we found out that too few people are actually happy when they are inside Microsoft Outlook."
Re: Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft is run by salesmen. Code that yields bullet points on a box takes priority. Code that just smoothes things out for the user is considered a pointless threat to the bottom line and is therefore deferred indefinitely.
Microsoft Outlook on the Mac (specifically meeting invites) has borked bullet lists repeatedly for me. Of course, in this case, it's "not Windows" so it must suck worse than the Windows version.
Funny thing is that Excel came out for the Mac first in 1985, and was so popular that they made a version for Windows 2 years later.
Re: Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”
#19People call this a bug, I call it an interoperability issue. Microsoft wanted to represent a real smiley in text without resorting to images. There was no standard unicode character for such a smiley so Microsoft chose a font that did support the smiley character. Of course hindsight is 20-20, it's easy to say now they should've gone with a character that wasn't in use yet, but circumstances being what they were, a b…
> People call this a bug, I call it an interoperability issue Furthermore, it's just a configuration issue. You can change it (it's in the autocorrection settings).
Can you change it as the receiver who sees the J?
Re: Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”
#20Raymond Chen commented on this, back in 2006: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=...