A cool posting about ribboned interface

Yesterday I started to search user opinions about ribboned interface in new Autodesk products. As AD official forums are heavily censored and all negative opinions are cut off (censors are quite sloppy, in some places there are answers to these opinions left untouched), I started to search in independent channels and blogs. And I found a very cool and funny posting:

http://architechure.blogspot.com/2009/03/well-intentioned-road-paving.html

I think there is much to learn for UI redesigners.

Ribbons, ribbons, ribbons…

I’d like to say some words too about this ribboned interface.

• It’s OK for small applications like Windows Paint – all is visible and comfortable to handle
• It’s not OK for big applications with thousands of commands like AutoCAD or Revit – all necessary is hidden, you have to make several moves to reach elementary tools and all this works painfully slowly. Both releases with number 2010 came with ribboned interface and it was really horrible. Fortunately in AutoCAD I could restore my layout from previous version, without ribbons, for Revit I still hadn’t time to mess with this, but it is not usable at all. In meantime I made my 3D sketches with Google Sketchup which still has normal interface – and this is pretty small application.

So where is the office application in this scale? Somewhere in the middle I think. And this ribboned interface for office is really a touch-and-go thing. When you want to play around with office, it may look amazing, when you need to do your work with office, I don’t know…

Windows 7

Past week I decided to try Windows 7 RC which is free to use in one year period.

To keep it short - not bad. Faster than XP on the same computer, all drivers work, all needed applications too. Only my GenoPro2007 compatibility options needed some tuning (Disable visual themes, Disable desktop composition) but GenoPro is a piece of software with really bad quality anyways, unfortunately there isn't anything better.

OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 installation was successful, I used it 2-3 days until I got 3.1.0 installer. Upgrading was not so good any more. After removing old version installer said that it is impossible to write into OpenOffice.org3/program directory. I had to stop installation, remove manually OpenOffice.org3 directory and then resume installation. This time I had success.

Windows native open/save dialogs in OpenOffice.org look freaky and behave so too. No autocompletition, no suggested file names. This means, I have used that when I export myfile.odt to pdf, dialog suggests file name myfile.pdf. In this dialog does it not. When I open file file14.ods, save it as file15.ods and then export it to pdf, suggestion line was empty. I chose previous export, file14.pdf and changed 14 to 15. It was clarly written on the file name line file15. When I hit Enter, dialog told me that file14.pdf already exists... so had to write all the filename letter by letter to save it with name file15.pdf.

Following pictures illustrate:

- Windows native dialog in Windows 7 / OpenOffice.org

- Next picture is thes same native Windows 7 file open dialog opened from Notepad2 (very old but my favourite simple text redactor under Windows):

Makes a bit difference?

And Windows Wordpad now supports odt file format (you know, this strange piece of software that comes with Windows and which no one uses). Somehow. Strange ways the formatting artefacts were almost the same as in KWord... mostly some offsets and distortions of paragraph borders and paragraph background colors.

Btw, these screenshots are made with Windows native tool, called "Snipping Tool".

And the most important - when you copy a large amount of files with Windows Explorer and there occurs an error, you can now skip problematic file and proceed instead on starting again... Unbelievable that it took so many years to implement this.