I have to admit, this actually looks pretty good to me.
Now about the ribbon – which replaces the Menubar and Toolbar in apps – I was not familiar with this interface element. And it seems to be a bit controversial, as some people really don’t like it. But just looking at some vids, it looks pretty usable and handy to me. Again, this isn’t from real usage, so there might be some issues I haven’t dealt with – but just looking at the presentation videos, I like what I see.
Here’s a video where someone defends the ribbon (a little too strongly, IMO). But I can see his point.
The ribbon is OK on the Mac version of Office, where the conventional menu is still available. On the Windows version the ribbon has taken over completely. Just today I spent half an hour peering at the tiny icons: "where the %$#* do I insert a footnote?
The ribbon interface makes sense for a big office application with tons of features.
For a filebrowser with such a tiny feature base compared to a office suite, it makes no sense and looks akwared to put such a big toolbar on the top of the filebrowser.
I work at a community college and everyone I know that is using the new office hates the ribbon with a passion…
That said how is a ribbon organized relativly haphazardly better than a well organized menu as most menus are.
In any case MS is going to rent Office in the future with a virtual HD file that is deleted once you subscription runs out… and there is going to be an app store so welcome to the age of the walled garden.
[quote=cb88]I work at a community college and everyone I know that is using the new office hates the ribbon with a passion…
That said how is a ribbon organized relativly haphazardly better than a well organized menu as most menus are.
In any case MS is going to rent Office in the future with a virtual HD file that is deleted once you subscription runs out… and there is going to be an app store so welcome to the age of the walled garden.[/quote]
that ribbon is the most irritating feature, it makes doing simple tasks difficult and it obscures a large portion of screen real estate as well as obfuscating functionality. I do know my wife likes it and I hate it. this leads me to believe that the focus groups used to research this design, were largely female and this is a more female UI, I would prefer to choose how to organize things myself, sort of like a canvas where I could pin function icons that I frequently use and a drill down function menu like is currently found in other applications.
Keep in mind, that the next generation is going to look at today’s menu-based interface, as today’s average user looks at the command line.
I don’t think, that this is going to happen. The latest version of OSX also intruduced the App store, but there are no threads with angry mac users complaining about that they cannot run their favorite freeware/opensource app, because installing from dmg files is disabled.
I can imagine a basic edition of Windows, which is free-as-in-beer but the programs you can run is limited to the ones installed from the app store.
If you look at the security point of view, the “walled garden” approach would prevent novice users to install any kind of potentially harmful programs (be it freeware or open source) (s)he found on the web, which is not exactly a bad thing.
Of course, the big drawback of this is, that you have to replace Gimp with another drawing program from the app store, which not only costs you money, but has half of its features…
As far as UI goes, “ribbons”, power bars, etc arnt very useful unless you can customise them completely. Detachable floating movable is the way to go. The ability to create macros and have it appear as an option is always nice too. Microsoft never impressed me as an innovator, more of a copy cat.
