Carson Chittom (@[email protected])

I was just remembering that it's a shame #WindowsPhone (this is not a joke!) didn't do better in the market. It seemed clear that someone—probably a group of someones, of course—actually sat down and thought about how someone would use it and what would be helpful. For instance, if you had an item on your calendar, it would, by default, go into DND mode during the meeting time and automatically come out at the end. You can configure this with #Android and (I assume) #iOS, but never underestimate the power of a default setting. Another simple and small, but very helpful, thing I remember is that the notification tile for the #email app—it was called "Outlook," of course, though I doubt how much code it shared with real, desktop Outlook—would show a count for the number of unread messages which had come in since the last time you opened Outlook. As long as you didn't see a number at all, you knew that you'd already glanced over what had come in and decided to look at it later, without having to remember "Did I have 17 unread messages before, or 16?" And so on. I miss it, weirdly enough.