3 ms·

Unsurprisingly, the one company still having a separate vision in the office application space is Apple. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are opinionated and very dif

Unsurprisingly, the one company still having a separate vision in the office application space is Apple. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are opinionated and very different from Office and the also-ran. The simple idea that your buttons for a Pages document are on the right side and scroll down is a genius use of space, yet Word et al. insist on the crappy top drawers of nonsense.

lloydatkinson 4y ago
Do you have a screenshot of this?
hbn 4y ago
Microsoft's ribbon UI is such a cluttered mess of a design paradigm. Who knows, maybe once you've memorized it, it's efficient. But for the amount I use the Office apps, nothing is ever where I'd expect it to be. And the layout is just insane, there's differently shaped buttons and groupings of functionality, etc. It's like they just came up with a bunch of icons for the different functionality and haphazardly dumped them all over in random tabs.
- jmmv 4y ago
  This. I only really started using Office about a year ago (after decades of being off Windows)… and… what a mess. I remember the ribbon being touted as “the next big thing” in UI design when it came out but I just don’t see how that makes any sense.
systoll 4y ago
I really wish MS had worked on bringin their 2008, pages-inspired mac UI to windows rather than bringing the ribbon to the Mac. https://appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/14/road_to_mac_office_2008_word_08_vs_pages_3_0 https://appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/14/road_to_mac_offic... Since then Apple switched from having a seperate inspector window for the controls to having a sidebar. I see this as a downgrade, but a minor one. And MS kind of went for the same idea but laid out the blocks horizontally. Which… since text is wider than it is tall, makes labels hard to fit in. And because people don’t scroll horizontally, they made the available options change based on the window width. So if you want to see everything, you’ll make the window fairly wide, at which point you’ve got the ribbon using up vertical real estate, and blank space on the sides where a side-bar or inspector could’ve been.
bsder 4y ago
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote were all Steve Jobs being pissy about Microsoft Office. We have given Keynote the colloquial name "iPreach" for a reason ... I used to use it, but Pages forced an update and clobbered a final I had made right before I needed to print it out. That was the start of my leaving the Apple ecosystem.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  It’s not Steve being “pissy” or really caring about the MS apps at all. Such attitudes, people. Pages and Numbers exist because Apple wanted a modern office-lite suite to cheaply bundle in place of the increasingly ancient AppleWorks for users who needed basic functionality. Keynote exists because Steve personally preferred to use a particular NeXT app for presentations — I don’t recall the name —- and it was no longer available. It’s bespoke presentation software originally built directly to Steve’s specifications.

lloydatkinson 4y ago

Do you have a screenshot of this?

hbn 4y ago

Microsoft's ribbon UI is such a cluttered mess of a design paradigm. Who knows, maybe once you've memorized it, it's efficient. But for the amount I use the Office apps, nothing is ever where I'd expect it to be. And the layout is just insane, there's differently shaped buttons and groupings of functionality, etc. It's like they just came up with a bunch of icons for the different functionality and haphazardly dumped them all over in random tabs.

jmmv 4y ago
This. I only really started using Office about a year ago (after decades of being off Windows)… and… what a mess. I remember the ribbon being touted as “the next big thing” in UI design when it came out but I just don’t see how that makes any sense.

systoll 4y ago

I really wish MS had worked on bringin their 2008, pages-inspired mac UI to windows rather than bringing the ribbon to the Mac. https://appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/14/road_to_mac_office_2008_word_08_vs_pages_3_0 https://appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/14/road_to_mac_offic... Since then Apple switched from having a seperate inspector window for the controls to having a sidebar. I see this as a downgrade, but a minor one. And MS kind of went for the same idea but laid out the blocks horizontally. Which… since text is wider than it is tall, makes labels hard to fit in. And because people don’t scroll horizontally, they made the available options change based on the window width. So if you want to see everything, you’ll make the window fairly wide, at which point you’ve got the ribbon using up vertical real estate, and blank space on the sides where a side-bar or inspector could’ve been.

bsder 4y ago

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote were all Steve Jobs being pissy about Microsoft Office. We have given Keynote the colloquial name "iPreach" for a reason ... I used to use it, but Pages forced an update and clobbered a final I had made right before I needed to print it out. That was the start of my leaving the Apple ecosystem.

KerrAvon 4y ago
It’s not Steve being “pissy” or really caring about the MS apps at all. Such attitudes, people. Pages and Numbers exist because Apple wanted a modern office-lite suite to cheaply bundle in place of the increasingly ancient AppleWorks for users who needed basic functionality. Keynote exists because Steve personally preferred to use a particular NeXT app for presentations — I don’t recall the name —- and it was no longer available. It’s bespoke presentation software originally built directly to Steve’s specifications.