A client just directed me to this blog post about Microsoft’s announcement that they’ll be discontinuing the use of Internet Explorer as a rendering engine for Outlook 2007 emails.

So, what crazy trick do they have up their sleeve? A Mozilla engine instead? Nope – you’re way cold. Hmm… it would be unusual, but maybe webkit or Opera? Nope… you’re SOOOO cold. Give up?

Instead of using anything remotely logical, they’ll be taking us all back about 50 web years and using Microsoft Word to display HTML emails! Makes perfect sense right? Don’t use a web browser, something that was built solely for the purpose of displaying HTML, use a word processor instead! Is this bizarro world?

Sadly, no.
See, if you had guessed Excel you would have been at least a bit warm.

This is baffling and frustrating news to be sure. For companies like us that design and develop rich HTML emails for their clients, this will severely limit what’s possible as far as design and interactivity goes. Picture webpages in the late 90s. Mmm… tables.

For the end user, it will no doubt result in a lot of HTML emails being mangled, garbled and generally hard (if not downright painful) to read. Nobody wins.

Since the last version of Outlook has been around for 4 years, we can probably expect Outlook 2007 to be “on the map” for at least another 5 or more. That’s a heck of long time to be stuck with such a terrible product. As you can see from the nearly 150 comments on that post above, this decision has angered a LOT of people in the web design/development field. I can’t help but share their sentiment and keep asking myself “why?”

After enduring the frustration of searching around the net for a good tutorial that explains how to burn a Mac/PC hybrid CD, I found this on Roxio’s Toast support site. It’s pretty complete but since I’m a PC person there were a few gaps I wasn’t able to fill in myself. After spitting out more coaster sets than I care to mention, I’ve created a real simple step-by-step guide to burning hybrid CDs. And I’m going to share it with you.

The most important thing you need to know is that you absolutely can not burn a hybrid CD with a PC. It has to be done on a Mac, at least as far as I can tell. Maybe it can be done on a PC, but I couldn’t figure it out. If anybody else can do it, show me how.

So without further ado, here’s the skinny:

1. Launch the Disk Utility in OS X (it’s under Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility)
2. At the top of the Disk Utility window, click on New Image
3. Name the image what you want the CD to be called. Set the Desktop as the destination and adjust the size of the image so that it can fit all the data you’ll be burning.
4. Select Create. This will mount a disk image on the Desktop.
5. Close the Disk Utility
6. Drag the Mac CD contents (i.e. leave out the PC-specific stuff) into the new disk image
7. Launch Toast (I’m using v5.2.3 because the latest version 6 doesn’t seem to support hybrid CDs very well) and select Custom Hybrid from the Other menu at the top.
8. Press the Select Mac… button and then choose the disk image you just created
9. If applicable, choose the file for AutoStart (but be aware that OS X doesn’t support AutoStart and most OS 9 users disable that feature)
10. Press the Select ISO… button (this is the data that will go on the PC) and drag in the same disk image (if you’re sharing data between the Mac/PC versions of the CD) as well as any PC-specific files, like autorun.inf.
11. Burn it!

Simple as that.