Preview the Office 2007 Ribbon-Like UI Floated For OpenOffice.Org

recoiledsnake writes "OpenOffice.org has prototyped a new UI that radically changes the current OO.o interface into something very similar to the new ribbon style menus that Office 2007 introduced and which have been extensively used throughout Windows 7. The blog shows a screenshot of the prototype in Impress (the equivalent of PowerPoint), but this UI is proposed to be used across all OO.o applications. Some commenters on the Sun blog are not happy about OO.o blindly aping Office 2007, and feel that the ribbon UI may be out of place in non-Windows operating systems."

Comments

Re:How about some nice menus instead? If there is

[davidsyes]

ANY interface in an office suite that Sun/OO.o should be copying, they need to pull their heads out of the sand and clone Lotus WordPro. It handles multiple documents in a superior way. If you have multiple, various-orientation/various sheet sized docs to handle, as divisions and sections, then WordPro would be IT. I have begged until i got sick of even trying to suggest any more yet they just don't seem to care. It's as if NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome is preferable to actually FIXING the GUI. OO.o needs

-- non-modal interfaces,
-- snappier/tighter icons,
-- better (more Lotus Approach-like) database
-- better multi-doc handling (get RID of the "rule line" separating docs and use LWP's tabbed interface, larger/thicker border to differentiate the docs

They would rather beat their heads against the wall than ape Word Pro or work constructively with Lotus/IBM. Sigh