Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 6th Aug 2009 13:18 UTC
The OpenOffice.org team has been experimenting with a new user interface for the suite of programs, and they've presented the first rough prototype of this new interface, more specifically for Impress. The general gist? It's Microsoft Office 2007's ribbon interface.
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Member since:2009-04-08
Just what I was going to say (no pun intended).
Notice that the traditional MENU is still there, something MS ribbon should have had. Ribbons are fine for common mundane tasks but they cannot display every option and command available (even in context). That is what menus do so wonderfully. I think that the combination of both interfaces might be the way to go but considering that this is just a mock-up, the menu might go away in the final iteration.
What is so wrong about menus? Cupled with keyboard shortcuts they are very efficient and fast if you're proficient.
Member since:2006-02-05
Ribbons are fine for common mundane tasks but they cannot display every option and command available (even in context). That is what menus do so wonderfully. I think that the combination of both interfaces might be the way to go but considering that this is just a mock-up, the menu might go away in the final iteration.
What features got the heave-ho in office 2k7?
What is so wrong about menus? Cupled with keyboard shortcuts they are very efficient and fast if you're proficient.
The problem with menus is that they don't scale up. They are fine if you have 20ish commands, when you have a few hundred discoverability goes out the window.
I am an infrequent word processor user, and I adore word 2007, just because it is very easy to make your documents look fantastic. I use Visual Studio every day (another product with about 40-50 items per menu, many of which bring up a tabbed or listed dialog with plenty of panes), and even though I know it inside and out, features I use infrequently often require a good deal of hunting (sometimes googling) to find again, and I am totally lost without my highly customized .settings file and addins.
Member since:2007-03-01
What is so wrong about menus? Cupled with keyboard shortcuts they are very efficient and fast if you're proficient.
The problem is the "if you're proficient" part. Excel is the biggest offender here imo. The only people I knew who could effectively work with Excel using the menu-based interface were people who had used it long enough to have memorized where everything was. For "Power users" change in interface should make no difference if you already have the shortcuts committed to memory.
For "regular users" however who want to use software like Excel as a tool, (ie I want my job to be "engineer" not "professional spreadsheet maker") I have found the ribbon to be more intuitive and have had a much simpler time doing what I need to do. I was always annoyed by the "menu hack" people who would look down upon you for not having memorized some obscure macro or function or something as though it was a sign of computing proficiency.
Member since:
2005-11-10
And those screenshots still have a traditional menu--with hundreds of commands in them. We can keep traversing back in time as to who invented tabbed commands, but the fact is that these are not the same thing as the ribbon. The ribbon outright replaces menus entirely, and that's not an easy task with an app like Word that has 1'500 commands.