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Office 2007 UI License
MikeWeller writes, "Microsoft has recently announced a new licensing program for the Office 2007 user interface. This page links to the license and an MSDN Channel9 interview about the program (featuring a lawyer). The program 'allows virtually anyone to obtain a royalty-free license to use the new Office UI in a software product. There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license.' What does this mean for OpenOffice? Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm? With the gap between OO and MS Office widening, how is this going to affect users trying to move between the two platforms?" You need to sign the license before you can get the 120-page UI implementation guidelines, which are confidential.
Fair enough. You want to compete? Then work your ass off...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
So, what this seems to say: Microsoft will allow anybody and everybody to plant their seed (the ribbon UI), to start the viral/grassroots campaign to their way of doing things. Unless and until it conflicts with their existing products.
It's royalty free... translation: Microsoft gets a free ad campaign. But for those who may not be familiar with the company Microsoft, Microsoft is not likely to be friendly about anyone using their UI on any product down the road they decide should be protected.
So are these the dying rattle breaths of a behemoth unable to compete today? Or is it one more salvo (consider Ballmer and his innuendo about Microsoft's Novell-Linux pact) in a war to control even more tightly the computing business world?
Ingenuity is Microsoft's best friend when it comes to fight GPL-licenced products. We are seeing the beginning of that.
You can copy any UI that you want to.
This is just a clear threat to competitors that they're going to be spending millions defending frivolous law suits. Interesting that Microsoft have decided that their business model is now to sue competitors.
Deleted
>>With the gap between OO and MS Office widening...
Well this is an interesting statement full of subjective possibility. I could probably argue a half dozen different interpretations.
One thing that those who dislike the X Window System often suggest is that it lacks consistency. They say that the GUI styles change too much between different applications, and then they suggest that Windows offers a much more consistent GUI. Of course, we can see this is quite a false assertion to be making!
Windows has just as little GUI consistency as X. This new Office interface totally deviates from anything they've done in the past. The IE7 interface is completely different, as well. It used to just be that it was certain apps, like iTunes and WinAmp, that used their own stylings. But with Microsoft's new GUIs, user interface consistency has become a thing of the past on Windows.
I wonder if we'll still hear such Windows advocates use the point that most Windows applications tend to use a consistent interface style. If they do, we can surely shoot their sorry asses down. As it stands, the only platform offering consistent UIs is Mac OS X. Otherwise, Windows has become just as much of a hodge-podge of different appearances and UI layouts as a typical X installation.
Did they? I seem to recall that the majority of reviews (I have read) actually thought the ribbon was a bad idea, until they tried it - at which point they thought it a great enhancement in managing the function bloat.
What does this mean for OpenOffice?
Of course I didn't RTFA, but considering that OO.o is a) multiplatform, b) open source, and c) doing fine as it is, I'd imagine the folks at OO.o will be filing this under D for Don't Give A Shit.
Seriously - would you lose any sleep because MS won't give you a new toy? Even if OO.o wanted it, and even if MS gave them it, they probably couldn't use it because it'll probably be Vista- (or at least Windows-)only.
And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.
C
from the licence:
"e. "Excluded Products" are software products or components, or web-based or hosted services that perform primarily the same general functions as the Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access software applications, and that are created or marketed as a replacement for any or all of those Microsoft applications."
i'm not sure if openoffice was created or marketed as a replacement to ms office. from their mission statement: "To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format."
While I love to sell OO to my friends on the fact that it's so compatible with Office that's the only thing about it's compatibility that I like.
Office for the most part has had a good UI. It has served people well over the years with millions of people getting used to it and being productive with it. Copying the interface and features of Office is a good way to get people to switch (Hey, it's free and it does the same thing, cool!).
But in the end I think all this "we can do that too" mentality ends up stifling free software. While I applaud the efforts of OO and am grateful for it's inclusion in modern distros I would also love to see them wake up one day and deceide they were going to take a "and now for something completely different" approach. Forget chasing the MS UI. Come up with your own, or stick to the one that's in there already and work on optimizing OO's use of resources. Create more filters for different file formats. Expand on the scripting capabilities to make OO a better tool for office automation. The UI is fine the way it is! Tweak it, yeah, but redo it to make it look like MS every few years? Screw that!
I understand why they do it but watching the OO team spend the next few years implementing knock offs of ribbons only to see these supplanted by some new inane concept in Office 2010 just seems like a waste to me.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
The license isn't royalty-free if you're building Office-style apps. So I ask, why would anyone want a royalty-free license for the user interface for Office applications (word processor, spreadsheet, database, personal info manager) unless they were building applications that would compete against Office?
Brain explodes.
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
With the gap between OO and MS Office widening
.doc would cause MS Office to crash a few ops after opening the file.
You mean Microsoft Office 2007 is so much worse than OpenOffice.org 2.0 and Microsoft Office 2003 ?
It still doesn't number paragraphs (1.1, 1.2) or update references automatically whitout dirty hacks ?
It still retains locks on directories when closed ?
It still somehow corrupt your document once in a while (*) ?
...
(*) Last month I needed to save the document as an XML document because saving it as
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
the funny thing is that Quanta+ in KDE has had a similar UI with a ribbon for years now:g n g
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/screenshots//shot2.pn
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/screenshots//shot13.p
Do they need a license too?
download and burn linux with one click on windows
...drag and drop the attached OCX to your application. :)
Congratulation
640KB of virtualized ram will be enough for everybody
My Smarter Colleagues noticed that from the same data structure we used for the lotus menus we could build PF-key menus, modern cascading drop-down menus and right-mouse-button pop-up menus.
Which means that for any menu sequence of head->middle->middle*->tail, you can change the visual appearance of the menu without changing the application-level calls used to create it. And that in turn means you can make "ribbon menus" a user-specifiable "skin".
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
I am not a programmer/developer/UI designer. But to me, it seems like the new UI is just the horizontal equivalent of the vertical pull-down menu, with some sugar coating here and there. "Transpose" all those pull-downs and it more or less becomes a ribbon. It seems like the equivalent of the lotus 123 slash ("/") command, where pressing "/" brings you the horizontal menu.
Did you look at the UI preview guide? Maybe it is just me, but it looks yet another attempt to change the UI for the sake of change. They have taken the concepts of menus, toolbars, dialog boxes and palettes and combined them in to one big tabbed blob that takes ups even more of the top of each window. Of course it is similar to, but in no way consistent with that annoying new interface they put on IE7. The only thing they have managed to keep consistent in windows is the need to press ^-alt-Del to login. They just don't get it.
I hope companies will see this for what it is: An attempt by Microsoft to do with a license trick what they are not able to accomplish with product quality.
There is a social breakdown happening at Microsoft. Bill Gates is, apparently, no longer interested. The company is becoming more and more unable to complete projects.
Microsoft never competed very well on technological merits, but now things are becoming worse. People think that Microsoft has been successful, but the company's success has always depended on tricking customers who don't have much technical knowledge. As customers become more technically knowledgeable, they realize more and more that Microsoft is adversarial.
We who read Slashdot can make a difference. We can explain the issues to everyone we know and meet.
--
Comedy and Tragedy of the Bush administration
I would venture to say that the overwhelming majority of MS Office users do not need to use, or even want to use, most of the features that are present in those bloated applications.
...I think OO.o could benefit from a better UI design rather than aping MS Office. The MS Office and OO.o UIs are too cluttered. I'd suggest something more collapsable and more sparingly reliant on just icons on the less used features. The other suggestion I'd make is to make the OO.o interface more "modal" in a way. As much as I hate 'vi' and it's modality, I think modes could be done right for Office apps. Again, you have all of the most common functionality available in the default mode with little or no space devoted to less popular features. Obviously this would require a study to rank the uasge of features. But there just aren't that many people who use "mail merge" on a daily basis unless they're in the business world. Maybe even having default "Home User" vs. "Business User" modes for OO.o would help. Just a few suggestions anyway. (Even though this is the wrong place for that)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
"Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm?"
How about turning that on it's head? "Will the paradigm of an ever-increasing number of features hold up to the reality of having to present them in a UI of some sort?"
I've been using office-style apps heavily since about Office 4, and I haven't seen many new features at all that I consider essential -- *especially* not ones that require adding UI elements to accommodate them. MS's own focus group studies show time and time again that 90% of Office features end up in the "rarely used" category anyway.
I use Office 2007 some, and I'm pretty neutral on the ribbon since I do most tasks via keyboard shortcut anyway. For my money (or lack thereof), let OOo keep its traditional menus & toolbars. Just make keyboard shortcuts consistent across an office suite, get the fundamental features right, minimize the bugs & make the memory & disk footprints as light as you can.
The Ribbon may be da new shiznit and whatnot, and by virtue of MS's market penetration may even end up being the "look" that all others are compared to. Even if that happens, though, I have a hard time seeing *feature bloat* being the driving factor behind what UI paradigm wins out.
Pi Ran Out
No, of course they can't. The idea is that a lot of developers who don't want to write an Office competitor anyway may well be interested in the freebie: it makes their product look like an MS product and it's (presumably) easier to use the freebie than write your own MS-style UI code. For the average customer, MS-style means it looks professional. Which is a big selling point.
What MS get out of this is that when you have a desktop full of applications which all have one UI style, any other style looks out of place, so the competition looks bad. Same deal as with VB: you can write your app in VB and it does a lot of GUI creation for you, but what you get will be MS-style buttons and so on.
is slightly better performance, initial feedback on the ribbon has been almost universally negative and there is no reason for other devs to rush to mediocrity. This is truly nothing more than an attempt at viral marketing.
But Microsoft don't give out ANY code to the new ui. So it's a
"Ok you may clone our look and feel, but you have to write all the code your self."
Writing a normal look and feel application would be much more easy, because windows contains much of the needed widget code.
Raise your hand (if you are used to being PAID for your code) if you have time to develop your own version of the ribbon within the scope of your next project?
a spx
Before you talk about knee-jerk reactions you might want to at least UNDERSTAND what MS are doing here. They are NOT giving you any CODE. They are simply allowing you to COPY their UI.
Go to the download page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa973809.
See any code? Libraries? SDK?
Now do you still want to thank them so much?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
It isn't a license to use a library that implements their UI features - it's a license to implement such a library. They're trying to license something that they don't own...
I don't know about reviews but personally I hate that god damn ribbon item. I've been using Office 2007 beta 2 since it came out for public downloading and I've really come to despise the thing. Sure it's easier to use basic functions but to do nearly anything beyond changing the font is far more difficult now then it was in Office 2003.
.doc file) into a document in Word. I still haven't found out how to do this in the ribbon. Eventually I just added the insert function to the so-called "Quick Access" tool bar.
One example I can think of is trying to insert a file (e.g. a web page or
It's just a shame that I'm too lazy to reinstall 2003...
The words "Microsoft" and "ingenuity" hardly belong in the same sentence. Considering the billions they allegedly spend on R&D, and I personally don't believe they really spend that much, you'd think they could deliver a better, more reliable product. MSFT has purchased its most innovative products. They haven't developed anything internally that's a home run product in nearly a decade. Their market position is more the result of file formats and OEM agreements than any creative development. They're sort of like Disney after they got rid of all the animators, costume designers and set builders. Just a shell with the name of the imaginative company they used to be.
The open source development model offers a more competitive approach to developing a UI and final product can be configured to user preferences and specific needs. There's no way a focus group will ever be able to compete with an arena where survival of the fittest determines the most useful products and configurations.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'm glad Microsoft is so innovative, because, you know, shaping a menu and toolbar differently is new, non-obvious, novel, and there is certainly no prior art containing anything similar, certainly not anything preceding it by a decade.
Given the obvious use of technology here and the subjectiveness of what may constitute a ribbon, and how broadly companies like Microsoft tend to paint their patents, I would contend that their "ribbon" is simply taking the Adobe Creative Suite's toolbar scheme that has been around for a decade and simply repainting it to fit in Microsoft Office components. Likewise, one can argue that since context-sensitive toolbars have been around for about 20 years, and buttons in those toolbars have optionally spawned menus when clicked for at least ten years, that there is NOTHING AT ALL new about a Microsoft "ribbon" aside from the artwork, which is covered by COPYRIGHT, not a patent.
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loo-hoo-SER!!
right here, in your own blood, on the dotted line. Did we mention the first male child clause?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
"the dying rattle breaths of a behemoth unable to compete today?"
I'm sorry, but your flair for the dramatic is a little much, even by slashdot standards.
"dying rattle breaths?" "unable to compete?"
Please. Aside from the notorious cash reserves, they're still making profits hand over fist.
When they start posting red ink, then we'll talk, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you...
The ribbon is some sort of widget, right? Why isn't it a part of windows?
-Dave
This just doesn't sound right. Here we have a known monopoly, with strong control of the desktop operating system and office suite markets. Isn't it in the slightest bit anti-competitive for them to offer this free to anybody but their competitors? I'm no expert on the legal side of things, but this is the exact kind of thing that anti-trust laws are supposed to prevent.
Miss Pac-Man already had one years ago... ;)
-- Rastignac was here.
But of course the GPL doesn't allow you to say that your code can't be used in Office-like apps.
Never mind, I don't see how the license can apply to anyone who doesn't agree with it.
HAL. (Not following the link!)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
it should be http://developers.developers.developers.slashdot.o rg/article.pl?sid=06/11/22/0140215 :-)
Microsoft might not personally be providing the libraries to facilitate this - but there are other 3rd party vendors who are - and Microsofts new license now legitimises these.
Do you realize how bizarre this sounds? Why do we need Microsoft to "legitimize" anything like this? It's a UI element, nothing more, and they aren't even providing it, nor did they invent it.
Remember back in the '80s, when Apple sued Microsoft over the "look-and-feel" of MS-Windows? Remember how Microsoft won that battle? Now they are trying to have someone else's cake and eat it, too. They want to threaten other people concerning the use of "look-and-feel."
Bah. Fuck 'em. This is just another indication of their arrogance.
I use DotNetBar in a custom vertical app. The ribbon is going to be used for a lot of stuff because it's the new cool bright shiny thing, and the menu bar is old and broken. But, that won't stop it from sucking.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the UI cloning battle fought a long time ago (the spreadsheet wars and the battle for the trash can). The courts ruled that it is OK to make a program work in the same manner, to copy the "feel" of a program. However, it is not OK to copy the specific artwork of a program.
Besides, To me, it looks like the Ribbon interface is merely horizontal menus instead of vertical menus, based on the couple of screenshots I've seen of it. Whooptie-flippin'-doo!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
From main post:
What does this mean for OpenOffice? Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm?
For starters, it means OOO will have to stop ripping off MS's ideas.
Oh, and a quick translation for the non-bullshitters out there: "forced to take on a new UI paradigm" is code speak for "creating your own ideas". Something OOO, with their "follow the leader" design model, has not displayed any ability for.
Nothing was stopping OOO from creating an innovative new interface. Aside from their own inability to innovate, of course.
"Developers, Developers, Developers" may be a running joke around here, and you may not be a fan of MSDN and the other tool sets, but if you code Windows solutions for pay, fuck you, I'm using them.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Part of the reason that MS is successful is because there is nobody out there that makes development for their platform as easy as MS. Maybe if some other companies would have somebody screaming about developers and throwing chairs, then those companies would be just as successful in this way. MS gives me tools, and makes it EASY. The OSS community tells me to RTFM. I'll give ya' one guess what I use to develop my business tools.
For User Interface, the best option is to let the user decide. When the user feels like they are in control, they embrace the application. If a user can make sense of this "ribbon style" of application control, why shouldn't Open Office give it to them? Even saying that this feature shouldn't come at the cost of hosing over those who think that a minimalist, classic style menu works best for them. A user should be able to use Open Office in either style but the goal is still the same: being productive.
One of the big points of Open Source is to empower the user. Instead of making draconian decisions about this sort of stuff as edicts handed down from the mountain at Redmond, Open Office should be allowing users to pick any style. Their is value in making Open Office look and behave like Office 2007 or like Lotus 1-2-3 or like any number of other configurations out there. Being able to give the users a choice is what is supposed to be an advantage against Microsoft.
Thanks for the tip.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
it just states that competitors can't use their Ribbon interface.
The key word is "their", as in it just states that competitors can't use THEIR Ribbon interface.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Doesn't Microsoft get it? Most users are click-trained on Office. If you move a single icon, they are unable to use the product any longer. If you put this new re-GUI-ed office on a person's computer, they'll be catatonic. I mean, I have seen many users who learn exact, step-by-step procedures. They don't explore. They don't adapt. Revamping the entire UI is a bad idea - people will flee to OpenOffice.
If IBM had any sense at all, they'd open source Lotus 1-2-3 immediately -- there are millions of people who still remember / commands and @ functions who would abandon MS Office in a heartbeat to go back to the old, familiar software. I mean, if Borland can re-launch Turbo, why can't IBM re-launch 1-2-3? I know for a fact it once ran on UNIX - can you imagine what would happen if a character-mode 1-2-3 was available with all the old keystrokes and functions? People would flock to Linux. Does anyone at IBM actually remember they own 1-2-3?
There aren't any controls released to facilitate the development of this? You mean they seem to think that independent developers need THEIR permission to develop custom controls which are actually derived from Adobe's GUI techniques, which predate Microsoft's "innovative" ribbon by at least ten years?
:)
How "generous" of Microsoft to grant such permission!
Hey Sun! Take a good look at Microsoft's ribbon, then at Adobe Creative Suite, realize that Microsoft's patent is nothing more than a farce based on Adobe's original take on this (they just didn't call it a "ribbon") and go to town in OpenOffice.org.
(insert an F-bomb Microsoft here)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
First, Office hasn't used standard Windows widgets since at least Office 97.
Second, GUI consistency used to be considered a plus, but now is recognized as overrated. This is because of the Web. People are used to browsing sites that have wildly different UIs and they're able to adapt to them without much problem.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
There was recent news out of Redmond that they were finding it hard to convince users that the upgrade to the latest Office suite is worth the money. This is because they know that back in 2000 they had a word processor that was more than good enough for 95% of users. All the rest are teeny weeny productivity improvements that anyone that spends less than X hours a day using will simply not appreciate.
It's like photoshop 5 compared to the latest versions... mostly productivity that only pros can truly make great use of (e.g. editing text as text is only handy if you're doing design revisions and have clients that have flip-floppy minds). Otherwise, P5 really is better than what most people need.
But to this end, OO.o really is more than what is needed by 95% of users. MS knows this too. For these reasons, Office has a fight on its hands from here in.
...there's not too many ways to reinvent the creation of a text based document that remains relevant to all that use it.
Except for the name. It's nothing more than a tabbed toolbar, right? Bluefish has also been using similar design for years. http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/screenshots/main_win .png
I know, I know....ignore the off topic trolls...i'm sorry but I had to offer some rebuttal....
Hitler was a Roman Catholic, baptized into that religious institution as an infant in Austria. He became a communicant and an altar boy in his youth and was confirmed as a "soldier of Christ" in that church.
Hitler seeking power, wrote in Mein Kampf, "... I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work."
Yea ummm...he sounds like a real secular atheist to me! Dinesh D'Souza is an idiot. He has an amazing gift for writing, but unfortunately no gift thinking.
If you must!
I mean, really, what good is this? I'm guessing the intent is to have third parties integrate with Office provide the same look and feel, but is a license agreement really needed for this? Couldn't they have just released the toolkit as part of MSDN? Most likely it is yet another attempt by MS to show the EU that they are committed to 'openness' without actually providing any kind of useful interoperability with potential competitors.
So if you are doing word processing, document editing, email, calendars, diagramming, data storage/database, reporting, presentations, or anything else useful for end-users, there is no royalty-free option.
If you are doing a Mickey Mouse IM, media player, or something else that can't generate revenue due to widespread competition, feel free to implement a UI that is incompatible with any platform other than Windows. (See above.)
Read what is said, people, not what you want to hear.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
THEY can ..er.. copy the MAC UI, get sued by Apple and win, in the 80s.
However, you can't do the same with MS's UI, in the 00s.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Well OpenOffice isn't being sold. So it obviously is NOT a competitor. Besides, isn't $100 billion enough for Bill Gates?
-Tuna www.supertunaman.com
From what I can see with progressing versions of Office - much of the UI is "neato", but I have yet to see any real productivity gains or or truly innovative means to get work done than I can in - oh - Appleworks. I'm not talking as a fanboy here, but as someone who works in an education lab, and watches room after room of people who just want to get something done struggle with where that command is or what this button really does. Didn't an MS rep nearly lead MW Expo in prayer while showing how the new Office could now keep a chart on a single printed page? This is groundbreaking?
We use Neo Office as well for student machines and still have a half dozen of us who pay for the current version of MS office. OO et.al. could do well to branch from the current UI canon for Office and look to do it better. I'd start with things like more keyboard equivalents for common tasks (this is a sore point with MS Office) and more thought-out menu heirarchies.
You're aping a company that still thinks that pressing "start" to stop is perfectly normal. There's plenty of room for improvement.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I've used Vista (Business version) and Office 2007 for 3 days now. Both at work and home.
All I say is that the new UI is in fact VERY similar to the interface at The Google "Docs & Spreadsheets" interface. It's so similar that I really ask how they could patent such a thing.
And by the way, what I really used to love about Microsoft products was that I always found logic places of "getting that function I look for". Now I'm lost clicking everywhere for like everything I look for. It's VERY clicky, and I already fear for people that have to start using their mouse more intensively than before. Some functions are hidden like beyond recognition (like you only find them at a little notice below the Save As filename).
I respect google for making their choice, since it's more compatible with Ajax or whatever, but Office 2007 UI is neither original nor user friendly.
Re: nobody out there that makes development for their platform as easy as MS
I've been really happy with Apple's tools. They have some advantages -- I hack USB drivers, and OSX+Xcode can do this user-space or kernel-space. MS requires an expensive "driver add-on" to visual studio because windows can only do kernel-space USB drivers. (Thankfully there are is a FOSS solution that essentially provides a tunnel so that you don't have to buy this driver add-on). Also, Apple's Core Data is a gui that lets you design your data structures, and then helps manage the structures. Xcode is free, too, and has neat features like distributed compilation.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Those are really just color/"theme" changes. They don't function any differently, although there are some applications that do.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Oh, I'm not saying that MS's framework does everything. I certainly wouldn't try to mess with drivers with plain ol' Win 32 stuff. It's just not made to do that easily. But for what most development consists of (high level stuff, like a front end and a middle tier and a database), nothing beats MS.
My current project is a middleware piece to connect my point of sale retail system to my web site. There's a little database in the middle to handle all of the extra info that our POS doesn't capture (product images, long descriptions, shipping costs, etc.), and a front end that I slapped together in no time at all, using Windows standard widgets (buttons, windows, treeview, sliders, web browser, FTP, etc.). I can't really say that I'm aware of another product or platform that will allow this to be done as easily and quickly.
DOS TEXT FTFW But serriously, its only to cover up the code.
The user interface on Office for the Mac (Office X and Office 2004) has this thing called the formatting palette, which is rather similar to the ribbon but I guess was a little ahead of it's time. I could see OpenOffice using the formatting palette without infringing on any patents, and still looking as crisp and up-to-date as Office 2007.
I've used both Office for Mac and Office 2007 (quite in depth, on both accounts) and I really think that this would be a great way for OpenOffice to come out the victor. The learning curve from Office 2003 -> OpenOffice wouldn't be as steep as Office 2003 - 2007, and you'd still get all the benefits of the "ribbon" UI.
I took a look at Microsoft Office. Running under VMWare on a 3 year old system, it was much faster than any other Office, even going back to '97. That's the extent of the good. The user interface is overwhelming and I mean that in the negative sense. At once you can see over a dozen different typefaces, and more attention grabbing graphics than I have attention for. Everything was shifting and changing colors without actually pushing a button. Just scrolling the mouse is deemed enough intent to make major visual changes to the interface. Office 2007 is a nightmare for anyone with even mild ADD or ADHD. That said, if there is a toned down version for us children over 18 who will actually be using the product it could be a very nice interface.
It will be great for opensource if licensing UI features becomes prevalent. GPL and all of the other licenses will work just as well for design elements as it does for functions and libraries. If you create an original UI element, you just attach a license to it that requires any other UI element in the same program to be freely licensable under the same terms.
Since the Office 2007 UI sucks, why would anyone else want to use it in their software?
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
Yeah, Microsoft files them, but design patents on visual screen elements are all limited to being used in conjunction with display hardware (meaning you the user may infringe but the software provider only "contributes" to the infringement which is a tougher case, and as widely discussed, it would be nuts for Microsoft to sue users). Furthermore, the scope of a design patent isn't very broad - i.e., where the "ornamental" impression is changed. It surely doesn't cover any ribbon interface, per se. The say they have utility patents pending as well -- well, let's see 'em , they may not be that broad either. As Apple proved, copyright won't get you too far on this. Nor will trade dress. In sum, this is not a very strong fence of protection. Another bluff that will be called and recede into distant memory.
All this talk of the ribbon UI, and yet no useful links to describe what it is/looks like.
Sigh.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
You're stuck in that position because of the file format and wouldn't be in that position if
The solution's been visible for a long time. It's only lately that it's been within grasp.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
but it was too long, so I just blogged about it: Of licenses, Microsoft Office, and user interfaces
Rudd-O - http://rudd-o.com/
I, for one, plan to welcome our Microsoft overlords into my home and office, just like last time!
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
I was wondering when the shills would come back to fight against the free market.
No one is faulting M$ for "making money". The fault the public finds is the same thing the courts on both sides of the Altantic have found fault with: predatory marketing and abusing its monopoly positions in some markets to establish new monopolies in new markets. In short, M$ apparently cannot compete in a free market and appears to do everything within it's influence, legal or otherwise, to stifle or eradicate a free market economy (or any competition at all) in the markets it sells in.
That's been the business model since the 1980's: M$ has leveraged the desktop monopoly Bill's mom got him from IBM into one for web browsers, productivity software / formats, and online audiovideo software / formats. It's that middle one, productivity software/formats, that's relevant here. If M$ had even documented it's office formats, there would be no need for the establishing a universal office format like OpenDocument. Without documentation, competitors are easily marginalized or even run out of that market, and of course without documentation it is darn near impossible for new entrants.
It's not about open source. Closed source and open source can both be used in conjunction with open standards to make loads of money. Yes, the Internet and the web were invented using open source and run mostly on open source, but this is all about open standards, which is a different thing.
Without open standards you would not have e-mail (SMTP/ASCII), the WWW (HTTP/HTML) or the Internet (TCP/IP). Nor would you have single sign-on authentication (Kerberos/LDAP), nor even long distance telephone service - not even land line, let alone mobile service. Not even would you have iPods or other "mp3 players", all of which are dependent on different components of MPEG. The list goes one. And, without open standards for productivity software, you end up in a situation with no free market there.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Hit submit too soon. Here's a quote on open standards (bold emphasis mine) from the Chairman of Nokia's Board of Directors, Jorma Ollila, a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist:
Everyone benefits from Open Standards, even M$, but it would then lose it's monopoly, it would still be able to compete and, if the product is good, make money. The main reason that M$ fights, is probably that the number one rule when you have a monopoly is to preserve that monopoly at any cost. If you keep the monopoly, then those expenditures in capital or political capital can still be recovered. If you lose the monopoly then you have to work like every other company.
Maybe a little competition would be good. Look at the kick in the pants MS-DOS 4 got when DR-DOS started to eat its lunch. Or MSIE when Firefox showed up. The radical changes to MS Office 2007 suggest that OpenOffice.org is making its presence known. We'll see. But, again, for there to be competition there have to be open standards.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.