4 ms·

The decline in UI drives me crazy, too. There's some irony in using a screenshot from MS Word in that blog post, given that back in the day Office was notorious

The decline in UI drives me crazy, too. There's some irony in using a screenshot from MS Word in that blog post, given that back in the day Office was notorious for having subtly non-standard UI elements (menus which remove little-used items after a while, destroying muscle memory, custom file dialogs...) - though they were at least using familiar idioms, albeit slightly jarring implementations of them. Of course in typical MS fashion rather than fix it, they moved from subtly non-standard to overtly non-standard UI elements! Personally I blame the shift to mobile as much as the shift to web for this - that's what drove the much-hated Windows 8 interface (leveraging the desktop computer monopoly to try and give the Windows Phone offerings a familiarity advantage), all coinciding with Gnome jumping the shark and Ubuntu shifting to something new. Ironic that during the end of the 'naughties' Apple were the pioners of touchscreen UI on commodity devices, but seemed to be the only player who understood that the desktop was a completely separate space, and should remain so.

gymbeaux 3y ago
But these days macOS and iOS are as similar as ever. I’m actually hoping Apple releases an iPad that runs macOS or a MacBook with a touch screen. I think they will do one or both eventually.
tjoff 3y ago
> There's some irony in using a screenshot from MS Word in that blog post, given that back in the day Office was notorious for having subtly non-standard UI elements (menus which remove little-used items after a while, destroying muscle memory, custom file dialogs...) This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that. Menus removing "unused" items must be one of the worst UI decisions of all time. Imagine how many user stories, thousands of tests and interviews resulted in that abomination. Sometimes you just can't beat common sense. Problem is to know when you can and when you can not.
- Narishma 3y ago
  > This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that. I believe that's Word 2002 in the article.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  > This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that. At the time, people complained about the menus popping out button-like borders on hover[1], which indeed no other menus did at the time, and about the un-buttony buttons on toolbars[2], which indeed directly contravened the Windows 95 HIG (unlike those in Word 95). Not all moments of peak Office happened at the same time. Word 95 was the last to be mostly HIG-compliant. The macro functionality only matured with Word 97—but once you were trying to do moderately fancy things like use Microsoft Equation more than a couple of times, it crashed multiple times per hour (and of course ME’s typesetting was absolutely awful). That gradually improved until it became stable somewhere about 2003 (the weird blue UI) or 2007 (the OOXML/Ribbon release)—at the cost at no longer being usable in the rest of the system using OLE (IIRC). What makes me genuinely conflicted is the contemporary rant against the Win95-style file dialogs[3]. I’m very used to them, to the point of finding it difficult to imagine anything else (I’ve encountered the vestiges of the old two-listboxes dialogs from Win95 on, but that’s all they were, vestiges). And yet I can agree with most of the criticisms! I just can’t see how to resolve them. (Office never left those dialogs intact, though, not in any version, although they tried damn hard to make their custom versions look like business as usual.) [1] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36 http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36 [2] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL38 http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL38 [3] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/file95.html http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/file95.html

gymbeaux 3y ago

But these days macOS and iOS are as similar as ever. I’m actually hoping Apple releases an iPad that runs macOS or a MacBook with a touch screen. I think they will do one or both eventually.

tjoff 3y ago

> There's some irony in using a screenshot from MS Word in that blog post, given that back in the day Office was notorious for having subtly non-standard UI elements (menus which remove little-used items after a while, destroying muscle memory, custom file dialogs...) This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that. Menus removing "unused" items must be one of the worst UI decisions of all time. Imagine how many user stories, thousands of tests and interviews resulted in that abomination. Sometimes you just can't beat common sense. Problem is to know when you can and when you can not.

Narishma 3y ago
> This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that. I believe that's Word 2002 in the article.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
> This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that. At the time, people complained about the menus popping out button-like borders on hover[1], which indeed no other menus did at the time, and about the un-buttony buttons on toolbars[2], which indeed directly contravened the Windows 95 HIG (unlike those in Word 95). Not all moments of peak Office happened at the same time. Word 95 was the last to be mostly HIG-compliant. The macro functionality only matured with Word 97—but once you were trying to do moderately fancy things like use Microsoft Equation more than a couple of times, it crashed multiple times per hour (and of course ME’s typesetting was absolutely awful). That gradually improved until it became stable somewhere about 2003 (the weird blue UI) or 2007 (the OOXML/Ribbon release)—at the cost at no longer being usable in the rest of the system using OLE (IIRC). What makes me genuinely conflicted is the contemporary rant against the Win95-style file dialogs[3]. I’m very used to them, to the point of finding it difficult to imagine anything else (I’ve encountered the vestiges of the old two-listboxes dialogs from Win95 on, but that’s all they were, vestiges). And yet I can agree with most of the criticisms! I just can’t see how to resolve them. (Office never left those dialogs intact, though, not in any version, although they tried damn hard to make their custom versions look like business as usual.) [1] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36 http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36 [2] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL38 http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL38 [3] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/file95.html http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/file95.html