It’s positively huge - taking up triple the space the toolbar and menus in Office 2003 did…
I use Office 2007 and don’t think that the ribbon takes up all that much space. You ought to read Jensen Harris’ post on this issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx
Why do you insist on taking everything to such extremes?
How about some pictures for the people that don’t want to downlaod Office 2007 beta so we know what the discussion is about.
As for the menu paradigm, I’m not sure I udnerstand how you ever get away from that, in IE it’s just icons and when clicked on they are menus, is this so different ?
Frankly I’m not sure (as a power user, I guess) I like the way things are developing with the dumbed down menus and then the search instead of a proper programs menu in vista.
And now theya re talking about a dock in “codename vienna”, this won’t be windows at all but mac or linux style.
I think Microsoft has hired way too many old Mac and Linux nerds, it’s not Windows anymore, it’s clone mac or copy firefox or copy linux.
I agree with Carl. Get a monitor that supports 4000x3000 pixel resolution and you’ll find that windows are quite useful.
Either that or get a windowing system where each windows isn’t filled with so much chrome that it needs a minimum 1024x768 pixels.
The menu serves no purpose on a window that isn’t active. All it does is increase the minimum size of the window and cause confusion when it’s not in focus. That’s why Mac OS’s menu at the top of the screen makes so much sense.
That’s why Mac OS’s menu at the top of the screen makes so much sense.
Er, yeah, until you have more than one monitor, then it makes zero sense at all. So the menu for the app on monitor #2 will be on the extreme left side of monitor #1. Awesome. And it’d be TOTALLY awesome for my three monitor systems at work and home.
The problem isn’t the positioning (although putting stuff on the top of the monitor is generally a good idea due to fitts’ law), but the fact that it’s a main menu.
You said:
Vista, in comparison, makes almost no changes to the core Windows GUI.
Excuse me no contrasting UI change in Vista when compared with Office? There was hardly any UI change from 2000 to XP, but XP to Vista? There are quite a lot of UI changes the fact they use WPF style controls for everything.
The number of little things that change add up. Like the small preview window on hover on task bar. The Start Menu has been completely changed. How File Exployer looks and operates. Its alot easier to talk about was hasn’t changed. Its a much shorter list.
Over Generalazation Argument Flag thrown blogger Penalized 50 yards.
The number of little things [in Vista] that changed add up. Like the small preview window on hover on task bar. The Start Menu has been completely changed. How File Exployer looks and operates. Its alot easier to talk about was hasn’t changed. Its a much shorter list.
There are changes in Vista, but nothing nearly as radical as dropping the “M” from WIMP. Office 2007 proposes we change the way GUI apps have been built for the last 20 years-- no more main menu.
there’s actually more elements to the web UI model that make it work
Sure, but in terms of WIMP specifically, the web has no concept of menus or windows (excluding popups, which are universally reviled, and frames, which have been abandoned). It’s a simple, flat, one window model where everything is visible and clickable.
But the analogies to web applications are weak, and people really need to stop thinking that the popularity of the web is due to its crappy UI.
A big part of the popularity of the web is absolutely due to its “crappy UI” (see the comment by alexander s, above). It’s simple by default. However, it is getting more complex over time with AJAX and so forth.
How about some pictures for the people that don’t want to downlaod Office 2007 beta so we know what the discussion is about.
I linked a bunch of Office 2007 sites in the post itself, but here’s another:
a href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679411033.aspx"http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679411033.aspx/a
You guys are missing the greatest ever UI update for windows: BlackBox. I use bblean, so I have an extremely small taskbar on the top of my desktop, and BB reduces the size of the title bar and side anchors to almost nil. BB also allows windowshading, and the right click menu lets you quickly mouse through a directory structure with no clicking. Also, the menu and colors are completely customizable with simple text files. I can’t live without it.
Wow, this is great, I’m not an Office user (and I still use Windows 2000!) so I have yet to try it.
Overlapping windows (except when specifically requested for a specific use) and linearly stacked multilevel menus were the 2 worst thing to happen to UIs since the QWERTY keyboard layout.
Reed
I literally never maximize windows, because I find it much easier to switch tasks with near-full-size windows.
I’m convinced it’s the way to go. Doesn’t maximizing any window miss out on the benefits proposed in Jeff’s post on Fitt’s Law?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000642.html
Jeff talks about Mac menus being of infinite height because they’re at the border of the screen. I’ve always arranged my windows so that certain key tasks can be rapidly switched to by using the infinite-sized screen edges. It’s much easier to switch to these tasks with an imprecise mouse lunge, and any maximized task prevents this convenience.
When you have maximized a window, how do you switch tasks? Do you alt-tab through a list of 10, or even 30 tasks? Do you move your mouse up to two monitors away to get to the task bar and click on that box, ending up with your mouse in the one location guarateed NOT to be pointing at your application?
I use those painful methods if I’m forced to, but with non-maximized tasks, I generally have a much faster way.
When windows are near full size, they can have cascaded corners that allow for easy task-switching to their neighbors.
The other key is heavy use of the Alt-Esc keyboard shortcut, which sends current task to the back of the window stack.
This “get this out of here” hotkey is especially nice for quick sub-tasks: switch from main task to a subtask by clicking on some screen border or cascaded corner. When done, instead of minimizing the window, just hit Alt-Esc. Now you’re back to the main task, and you still have the corner of the sub-task when you need it again.
Of course, once I have all my windows set up, I don’t want to reboot for about a month, which can be problematic. The fact that there’s no easy way to tell windows to save such a layout of applications and open documents is an indication that not many people use windows this way.
But like tabbed browsing (which just makes every page two clicks away instead of one) I don’t understand the benefit of maximizing a task.
I get more use out of the 5% edge of the screen that I didn’t maximize into than I do out of the taskbar and alt-tab combined.
Personally, I’m disgusted with Office 2007 and have no plans to upgrade. All the shortcuts that I have spent years using, such as ALT+I, S (Insert|Symbol to get the symbol dialog to insert something like the “cent” symbol, degree symbol, etc.) and ALT+E, S, U (Edit|Paste Special|Unformatted to paste text from the clipboard without bringing along its original formatting), are gone. I now have to use the mouse to navigate through the )@*$)@ “ribbon bar” to find this stuff.
By removing my shortcuts and sticking me with this ribbon bar–with no way to turn it off that I have been able to find–Microsoft has made my work slower and harder. They have forced ME to adapt to the product, rather than making the product adapt to me.
I’ll stick with Office '03, thank you very much.
It’s days like these that I wish a truly viable competitor to Microsoft would exist.
removing my shortcuts
The KEYBOARD shortcuts are still available, but they may be different. In fact, as you press the ALT key, the ribbon “lights up” with the keyboard accelerator shortcuts next to each item. It’s very slick.
Dar, here’s screenshots of the way keyboard shortcuts work with the ribbon:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/13/480568.aspx
It’s far better than 2003 ever was.
Sad that everybody tries to do what Microsoft does, but good that Microsoft at least made it better with this version of Office. Maybe this time it will be more difficult to implement as a Web Application. :-). The Office UI has pretty much followed the same path for 10 years, and people have bought it every time thinking “this is how office applications should be”. This is why competition is so good, because “new features” seems like the only reason why people have bought new versions of Office through the years.
All the shortcuts that I have spent years using […] are gone
No, they are there. There is a keyboard interface to Office Vista, it’s visible once you press ALT. Read the vista UI blog
A user scans a menu by reading the text of the menu entries.
A user scans the “Ribbon” by doing what? Hovering over the cute icons until a tooltip appears?
Patrick, you need something like MultiMon to help manage your taskbar and windows. You might have a “system” now, everyone does eventually, but windows’ support for multi-monitors is so underwhelming that the added value and convenience of MultiMon is worth the download. The per-screen taskbar is so useful you’ll wonder how you got by without it. And it’s free!
If you like the taste, you might look into something like UltraMon. (I’ve heard both kind and disparaging things about powerstrip as well, but never used it.) For $40 the extra value over Multimon might not be there, but it’s actively developed and supported.
Er, yeah, until you have more than one monitor, then it makes zero sense at all.
That’s because you’re using three small monitors to emulate one huge one. If cost wasn’t a factor, I’d rather have one huge monitor.
The problem isn’t the positioning (although putting stuff on the top of the monitor is generally a good idea due to fitts’ law), but the fact that it’s a main menu.
I like the ribbon and I could possibly live without the M, at least as the primary method of accessing any given function. But I won’t stand for the loss of W.
Patrick
A user scans the “Ribbon” by doing what? Hovering over the cute icons until a tooltip appears?
The Ribbon packs in much more (and richer) information than the current menu/toolbar/icon paradigm.
That’s because you’re using three small monitors to emulate one huge one. If cost wasn’t a factor, I’d rather have one huge monitor.
Or I could use three huge monitors… you assume this is a zero-sum game, that one can have a single monitor that’s “enough” desktop. The only practical limit is how far you have to turn your head.
Even if you did have a single GINORMOUS widescreen, the single main menu at the top of the screen totally breaks down. What about apps that are positioned on the right hand side of your giant desktop? You have to mouse all the way over to the extreme left top to get to the application’s menu. It’s silly. So even for single monitors, as they get larger, the Apple menu paradigm gets worse and worse, too.
They have forced ME to adapt to the product, rather than making the product adapt to me.
Yeah, but you’re in that 1% of users that think that way. The other 99% don’t want to sit there configuring the product, they want ease-of-use out of the box.
In a sense, this reminds me of myself - sometimes I think how cool it would be if my car would allow me to reprogram the automatic transmission - then I remember that 99.9% of my fellow car owners would have absolutely no use for that feature and the manufacturer should probably focus that engineering time on making the stereo easier to operate.