18 ms·

I am guessing that only Office power users hated the MS ribbon. I loved it, it's do much easier to find stuff if you already don't know where it is. Great des

by d0100 8y ago

I am guessing that only Office power users hated the MS ribbon. I loved it, it's do much easier to find stuff if you already don't know where it is. Great design for the casual Wordster.

atoav 8y ago
yeah but it is software: ehy not serve both?
- duckmysick 8y ago
  Because it's software. Additional options mean additional code, which leads to increased complexity and burden on maintenance. And it's not a linear increase. It doesn't mean you can't add new features (or code), but doing so leads to trade-offs.
Spooky23 8y ago
Only a specific set of grumpy people of a specific age give any shits about it. The real difference with the ribbon is that computing shifted from professionals and workers to everyone. The audience that cares about old style windows menus is vocal and tiny. Users struggled to discover, locate and remember items in the old menus. Many users struggled to find the menu. That said, the Mac menu system is the best implementation of that type of menu delivery.
btschaegg 8y ago
There are two interesting factors to the Office Ribbon and its clones. 1) You can absolutely botch it. A good example of that is Sibelius: Their Ribbon does not make any sense at all (and is in multiple instances literally a waste of space). Personally, I find the ribbon design on MS Office to be much better, though; MS has clearly put much thought and experimentation (i.e. many studies) into the concept. 2) What I find to be extremely interesting: For MS Office, the ribbon introduced better shortcuts. Since Office products are totally overloaded with functionality, the parts you don't use often were usually left behind in terms of useful shortcuts. With the Ribbon, these functionalities are usually accessible via a Spacemacs-Style mnemonic keypresses. If you use a specific functionality over and over, it's now much easier to remember a not-so-bad way to trigger it from the keyboard. On another note: I also find the "new" formatting context menu that pops up in MS Word whenever you select some text to be a very clever idea. It remembers me much of an old Xerox demo[1][2] that was done with a mouse and a trackball simultaneously (featuring a palette you could place around where you were currently making changes with the mouse). I'm convinced that to this day, there's a lot of ignored potential in that concept. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTFcItyE9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTFcItyE9w [2]: https://www.billbuxton.com/TGtaxonomy.html https://www.billbuxton.com/TGtaxonomy.html

by d0100 8y ago

I am guessing that only Office power users hated the MS ribbon. I loved it, it's do much easier to find stuff if you already don't know where it is. Great design for the casual Wordster.

atoav 8y ago

yeah but it is software: ehy not serve both?

duckmysick 8y ago
Because it's software. Additional options mean additional code, which leads to increased complexity and burden on maintenance. And it's not a linear increase. It doesn't mean you can't add new features (or code), but doing so leads to trade-offs.

Spooky23 8y ago

Only a specific set of grumpy people of a specific age give any shits about it. The real difference with the ribbon is that computing shifted from professionals and workers to everyone. The audience that cares about old style windows menus is vocal and tiny. Users struggled to discover, locate and remember items in the old menus. Many users struggled to find the menu. That said, the Mac menu system is the best implementation of that type of menu delivery.

btschaegg 8y ago

There are two interesting factors to the Office Ribbon and its clones. 1) You can absolutely botch it. A good example of that is Sibelius: Their Ribbon does not make any sense at all (and is in multiple instances literally a waste of space). Personally, I find the ribbon design on MS Office to be much better, though; MS has clearly put much thought and experimentation (i.e. many studies) into the concept. 2) What I find to be extremely interesting: For MS Office, the ribbon introduced better shortcuts. Since Office products are totally overloaded with functionality, the parts you don't use often were usually left behind in terms of useful shortcuts. With the Ribbon, these functionalities are usually accessible via a Spacemacs-Style mnemonic keypresses. If you use a specific functionality over and over, it's now much easier to remember a not-so-bad way to trigger it from the keyboard. On another note: I also find the "new" formatting context menu that pops up in MS Word whenever you select some text to be a very clever idea. It remembers me much of an old Xerox demo[1][2] that was done with a mouse and a trackball simultaneously (featuring a palette you could place around where you were currently making changes with the mouse). I'm convinced that to this day, there's a lot of ignored potential in that concept. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTFcItyE9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTFcItyE9w [2]: https://www.billbuxton.com/TGtaxonomy.html https://www.billbuxton.com/TGtaxonomy.html