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Office 12 Exposed
damieng writes "The Programmers Developer Conference (PDC) has unveiled
the user interface for Microsoft Office 12. Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Aqua and brushed metal looks from Mac OS X the menus now appear to operate more like a tab popping-out the right toolbar instead of a sub-menu."
I wonder if they're going to codename it Office Vista, in keeping with common versioning practices.
...but it looks as though they've thrown every bit of GUI common practice and standardization out of the window.
The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river.
Yes
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Behold! The wonders of Coral Cache!
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thats ugly looking, seriously. Although I'm not found of the OSX interface either
It's not the look that really matters - we've gone through endless cycles of what looks "neat", skinnable apps, and now 3D spinning apps (though I find it hilarious that the brushed aluminum look is being attributed to Apple. I used brushed aluminum on my first website about 15 years ago. It's hardly a unique appearance).
What is really interesting, however, is that they fundamentally changed the usability of the application - the manner in which toolbars look and layout has changed, as have many of the other user-interaction elements. This is something that Microsoft has been very hesitant to do, as one of the reasons people stick with Office through the versions is consistency - Drop Office XP in front of someone who used Office 95 a decade ago, and they'll largely find it the same (just with more/better features).
With Microsoft significantly changing things, they have the risk of it being such a schism that people seriously evaluate the option of going to Open Office or other alternatives. If your users are going to need training, and are going to bitch and complain about their cheese moving, then you might as well re-evaluate the whole thing.
"We hit true WYSIWYG and haven't seen a real change since,"
Not with Word we haven't. I still can't print the exact same Word file on two different printers and get the same pagination. Thank God we're switching to PDF-based prepress systems to sort of eliminate this problem. If I'm in a rush and this problem occurs, I tell the support staff to just fudge the layout (insert carriage returns, screw with margins, whatever) to make it work so I can get something out the door.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
. . .requiring 95% of its user base to relearn everything they already know. . .
.did I just describe the state of word processors, or the state of enterprise software in general?
Don't be silly. Everyone knows the reason not to change to OpenOffice is to avoid retraining.
. .
They're starting to run out of chrome and tailfins. Now they're starting to put tits on the squid.
KFG
If they can't figure out what goes where while they are rearranging the save dialog, what hope do the end users have of finding things.
You must be new here. It's always Windows fault.
Some of you Microsoft apologists will disagree with the above, but you can easily verify this. Try to do a print preview in Word before you set up a printer on the machine. It won't let you! Why? Because they need to know the hardware to know what the hardcopy will look like. True WYSIWYG is device independent, i.e. they print it to match the on-screen look not the other way around as Microsoft does.
Why is this important? Amongst many other reasons, we need to know when we email someone a document that it will print out on the other guy's printer (most probably a different model than ours) exactly as it was meant to. Anything less is pathetic at this point.
AC
This is why OS X's use of a PDF-based graphics model was such a good idea. What you see on screen is how it's going to look when you print it (further solidifying the presence of Macs in the publishing industry). The Windows graphics model in 2005 is just embarrassing.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Well, I see that if you Google on "tits on a squid" my original use is all that shows up, so I guess it's "mine." I promise not to sue anyone who uses it though, unless they put an "i" or a "G" in front of it. I admit it, I could use 35 mil, and I'd settle for dollars or euros, not pounds.
The NY Times can substitue the politically correct euphemism "Feminine mammilian secondary sexual characteristics superimposed onto a coleoidean companion," or "Fmsscsoacc" for a snappy and easily pronouncable acronym.
It's not really a replacement for "jump the shark" though. It means something a bit different from a differenct point of view.
It refers to adding a powerful attractor to something that isn't otherwise very attractive; and may even be innately repulsive, but whose actual value and usfulness is, ummmm, "questionable."
And to a certain extent it'll work too, especially as displayed on the sales floor the squid is all dressed up in a Wonderbra(tm) and a tight blouse unbuttoned just so. The instinctual response to reach out and fondle will be very strong.
Of course, sooner or later, after you get it home and out of the shrink wrap, you'll start to realize you're getting all hot and bothered by feeling up a squid, at least if you've reached the primate level of evolution. That still leaves the problem with management.
"Jump the shark" is the "consumer" point of view phrase for an attractor having lost its attractiveness.
B.F. Skinner already coined the phrase for this from the marketers point of view. He noted that you could train a pigeon to do extrordinary things, so long as you never broke the task/reward cycle. If you did that the pigeon in question would simply ignore all further attempts to train it to do anything at all.
He called this "losing your pigeon."
How apropos.
KFG