Microsoft wraps Windows 8 in Ribbon UI? Microsoft could be taking a chance by making Windows 8 look more like Office 2007, if some leaked screenshots are the real deal. The alleged screenshots of Microsoft's successor to Windows 7 reveal an unfinished Ribbon UI - based on a concept Microsoft first introduced with Office 2007 in November 2006. The UI could replace …
Can you imagine the telephone conversation:
'Just click the the third icon down - it looks like a crow*.. just hover the mouse over it.. yes that's the one'
And if the ribbon is context sensitive they will keep changing around as well, and I bet there won't be an option to turn off the icons and just have text buttons.
Could _this_ be the end of windows?
ttfn
*I don't care what the icons actually look like - and I don't intend to have to learn them either.
"For those of us who use computers professionally, the ribbon is a disaster."
Nice of you to speak on my behalf - except that it isn't true. Surely those of us who use computers "professionally" use keyboard shortcuts for most stuff so don't give a crap if something is in menus or not. If there is something I'm not familiar enough with to know its keyboard shortcut, the ribbon makes it easier to hunt for than several layers of nested menus.
Anyway, Windows 7 has gone most of the way towards Ribbons. All the apps use it (photo gallery, the video editor, DVD authoring, write pad etc). It makes sense for the rest of the OS to go the same way.
Honestly, there is no group in the world worse than IT for "We don't like change".
"Anyway, Windows 7 has gone most of the way towards Ribbons. All the apps use it (photo gallery, the video editor, DVD authoring, write pad etc). It makes sense for the rest of the OS to go the same way."
All the built in apps use it. You know, the ones that get replaced by a more professional version by those who use them a professionally. The ones everybody hates because of their beribboned badness.
Anyway it's the one that you don't use all the time that suffer most from a new UI because you can't remeber all the keyboard short cuts.
I remember all the people who hated the 95 interface when that was released. Pretty much all of them switched it off and used the old, far less functional, 3.11 interface. It was the same with the XP interface and the Vista/7 interface.
What is it about people who work in IT being so resistent to change? It's always spun as the old way is better, when more often than not it's a case of not wanting to learn something new. Which is odd, considering the speed at which IT moves.
"considering the speed at which IT moves" - that would be precisely the point. There's enough change that you simply HAVE to learn to keep up that changing anything unnecessarily becomes an annoyance. Add on top of that the typical technophobic user response and you end up picking up a similar approach.
I don't like the ribbon interface as it seems unnecessary to me and I dread changes to the Windows interface as you can guarantee my phone will go millisseconds after a new system is put in with a user wailing "WAH! I can't find anything!" before it's even finished booting.
Win 95 was universally hailed as an improvement over Windows 3.1 in pretty much every way including the desktop shell. In fact, there were 3rd party add-ons for Windows 3.1 to make it more like what would eventually be Windows 95.
Although there's no good reason that legacy UIs can't remain available for those that actually like them. This sort of nonsense isn't about making the product better but artificially creating some reason for new sales.
The word processor is an OLD problems.
Artificial bother is what IT people complain about. Bother is something that you should choose yourself to engage in because it adds some value for you, not just because the relevant monopolist needs to milk it's cash cow.
Maybe they just want to do their job instead of learning new crap every year?
Call me stupid, but once I set my desktop the way I want, it makes my job much more enjoyable.
I don't want to spent the next few months learning how to make my new desktop look like the old one (you know the one that I like).
I try that with office and I hated it to the point that I downgraded it.
P.S.
Yes I do have windows classic look on all my windows editions.
"Windows 8 file synching and sharing with the web will be baked in, with icons for "sync" and "share" on display in the shots. Why are they there? It's unclear."
Not too unclear to me - he might not have executed very well (so goes the version of his demise at Microsoft that rang the truest to me) but it doesn't really seem much of a mystery to me... just look at Groove if it even exists anymore... when you see "share and sync" at Microsoft you can be sure Ray's fingerprints are still there. Thank you Ray, we miss you!
Regarding Ribbon, since I don't have anything nice to say... GRRRRR
"the old shortcuts still work with the ribbon ui and the ribbon ui looks great."
Er, great, except that those keyboard shortcuts don't appear in the new UI at all and MS aren't selling the old version of Office anymore.
Obviously if they were then I *would* buy 2 copies of Office only to chuck one of them in the bin after I'd memorised it... Who wouldn't?
When the ribbon first came out I hated it. With a vengeance. I've been a power user of MS Office since I moved from WP6.2 in the late 90s. I was always the person who used obscure features of the package and who people in the office came to for help. The ribbon just seemed like something that hides stuff that you knew where it was before.
I still think the ribbon has its flaws, but I'm no longer a hater. I was recently working on a document which contains loads of mathematical formulas. I had been working on the document in a pre-ribbon version of the software and I'll be honest it was a bit of a nightmare. I started using Office 2010 and it was really really easy to use it. The ribbon does have a place, but you definitely need to think a bit differently in order to use it.
Oddly enough, the shrink wrapped software that I used to be the lead architect for started using something like a ribbon interface in 2003/4 (before I joined the firm). I insisted on moving away from that interface because our users hated it. I don't think our ribbon was as well designed as the MS ribbons have become, but still it is a sobering lesson.
Hmmm. When I have to use a computer with Office 2003 installed on it, I feel like I've stepped back in time about fifteen years. Office 2010 compared to Office 2003 is kinda like the difference between Windows 7 and Windows 95. I've been using a Windows shell replacement for years because Explorer is so woefully under-powered. Adding a shed-load of extra functions may dismay the easily confused, but for those of us who have the ability to learn new tools it's going to be great. Why the hell didn't MS do this sooner!
Just because somebody gets used to bad design, eg: Office 2003, it doesn't become good design. I think some people resent the loss of their 'investment' in learning to use crap tools when something better comes along, eg: "Flint were good enough for yer dad and yer grandad. We don't want none of this fancy bronze in our village. What'll happen to our traditional skills? It's madness!"
I thought this ribbon crap would start to go away with Ray Ozzie gone.
As a long time user, I already find the Windows Explorer in Win7 to be inferior to the previous version (yes I meant to include the Vista version).
Maybe the could produce two UIs, one for the loyal user base and a different one for the people that MS seems to think would prefer a different OS.
"The only problem is that the Ribbon UI has upset a lot of users and partners since its introduction, because it changed the familiar Office interface and gave them something new to learn."
No. The ribbon interface didn't upset people because it gave them something new to learn - it upset people becuase it was very badly implemented and is very annoying to use.
The thing that annoys me about the ribbon is that it seems like every time I want something it's on different bloody tab. That means an extra mouse click that I didn't use to have. I used to configure the tool bar so it had everything I wanted. I got it down to a single row of buttons. That put everything within a single mouse move/click.
I *think* that might be possible again with Win 2k10 based on a play a year ago but sadly my company has yet to roll it out so I haven't had time for a decent investigation.
They look like crap in most of those pictures, but if you minimize them, then ribbons act just like menus, except with big icons. Certainly looks like overkill for a program that's not supposed to take up much screen space. But does make sense for touchscreens. Especially considering a lot of those functions are "hidden" on the right click menu.
It's nice to see the "Move to Folder" tool finally getting some love.
I just hope they fix the tree so that it will scroll horizontally again.
Current link is: http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows-7/windows-8-secrets-windows-explorer-ribbon-130084
The Ribbon UI per se is not "bad" - for crying out loud, it's just a toolbar by another name, with some additional context sensitive adjustments and sophisticated grouping.
However, there are good and bad implementations of the Ribbon UI.... even within Office, the Word ribbon is pretty good, with some caveats, the Excel ribbon is frustrating, with even more caveats, and the PowerPoint ribbon just plain sucks. Outlook uses the ribbon only in some areas, and largely does a pretty good job with it.
So the question is, how well will the ribbon implementation be in Windows 8 ?
+ it appears to be the incorporating of ribbon on Windows [File] Explorer specifically, rather than some hard core, intrinsically enforced ribbon across the *entire* UI.
Calm down folks....
"The Ribbon UI per se is not "bad" - for crying out loud, it's just a toolbar by another name, with some additional context sensitive adjustments and sophisticated grouping."
Toolbar = waste of space. If I need to navigate a UI, then hovering over each graphic and waiting for the tooltip to tell me what it looks like is at least one order of magnitude slower than reading text.
Context sensitive adjustments = it's moved since the last time you hunted it down, so start again, hovering over the graphics and waiting for the tooltips.
Sorry, but as a piece of interface design, the toolbar can only really be understood as a deliberate attempt at pessimisation.
>It was first introduced by Microsoft to make it easier to find features buried in the depths of long menus of Office.
... and to make it impossible to find features previously easily accesible from straightforwrd, simple, logical menus
Recently got a copy of Office 2010 - productivity seriously reduced. Time to switch back to OOo
MS staying status quo is even riskier. Even though I'm sure there will be some unhappy people the most unhappy would be MS when Windows 9 came about and they finally realized though large market share loss that no one wants an antiquated UI. People who hate the idea (without even seeing it in action no less) are likely scared of change in general. Ms needs to shake things up in the next go around as people's primary devices will move to tablets and touch display laptop and desktops.
That’s a lovely little nail in the coffin. As if the licensing costs/obscene complexity, vendor lock-in, horrific lack of interoperability and terrible lag on basic features weren’t enough, now they want to foist that monstrosity of a UI on the core operating system?
Straight to hell. No passing go, no picking up your 200 chits.
100% of the software budget for the next 5 years will now officially be devoted to bribing my two recalcitrant software vendors to port to Java. (The other three have already done so!) Immediately afterwards, I will be binning the entire stack of Microsoft software, top to bottom. Looks like Windows 7/Server 2008 R2-gen will be my last go at the Microsoft stack.
Red Hat, I’m all yours! Let’s do this Enterprise IT thang, shall we?
At least someone put some careful thought and consideration into making the Windows 95 UI a genuine improvement over 3.1
And it worked dammit. Nobody was complaining that they "liked Windows 3.1 better". Because that's what an improvement is, changing something to make it BETTER. Not just changing it to make it different.
...since 95 came out. No really, I hate the Start Menu paradigm, always have. The Ribbon was an abomination that should never have seen light of day in Office, and should be buried back deep in a cave somewhere instead of being slapped onto Windows. I'll keep my OpenOffice and Linux, thankyouverymuch, and feck this Microsoft crap. If this doesn't completely kill Windows on the desktop (Vista very nearly succeeded in this effort) then I will have completely lost my faith in humanity.
Yeah, the penguin. Suck it.
No. The ribbon was introduced as a product differentiator. What from? Why Open Office...
Open Office, looks like a word processor/spreadsheet/etc. Nobody can copy the patented MS Office Ribbon so they remain unique. At least, that was the idea.
It is a bit like the g**awful slot that Intel introduced for the pentiumII way back when. The idea was to have an uncopiable form factor. Instead they ended up with CPUs that wouldn't fit well or even fell out when you stood the PC on its side. Intel CPUs seem to have returned to the pin-socket style. Hopefully Microsoft will drop this stunningly stupid idea too.
Windows 7 is okay, just keep fixing the bugs and release minor new features in service packs, as per SP1. What could they possibly put in Win8 that would make people upgrade (again)? Certainly NOT a ribbon.
I actually prefer Windows Explorer in XP than in Vistra or Win7.
It's not what a new OS will do for you - it's the money it will bring in to Microsoft.
Each generation of OS is designed to die and use of it discouraged - the only exception on the Microsoft side was XP, when the tablet format came out and it became obvious that they couldn't run Vista, Microsoft generously/ worriedly extended it's lifespan.
ttfn
windows, cpu cycles got cheaper so they wasted megahertz. memory got cheaper so they wasted megabytes. hard disks got massive so they wasted gigabytes. now screens are bigger they're wasting pixels. if it looks like a pile of shite and it smells like a pile of shite, it is a pile of shite.
The average vertical pixel height is shrinking, especially on laptops. Before all this widescreen madness, an average display had 1024 vertical lines. Now we're lucky to get 768. If MS are determined to foist the ribbon on people, perhaps they could allow the option to move it to the left of screen rather than the top. Better that than peeking at the visible sliver of your documents between the ribbon at the top of screen and the (also widening) taskbar at the bottom.
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