I'm not commenting on the article in general (well, I am but in another thread-- look it up if you care), I was just countering your ludicrously ignorant claim that mail order did not cause a paradigm shift in the US economy.
Because it was ludicrously ignorant.
I'm contributing to the conversation by educating you, and anybody else who was dumb enough to have taken your ludicrously ignorant statement at face value.
They're just going to use the year to close out the contentious distribution center in CA and move it somewhere else... Nevada, or Oregon, or Arizona. That would eliminate this particular headache, and compliant to Federal Law (which CA can't do anything about) allow them to resume selling tax-free in CA, since they'll no longer have a physical presence in the state.
I'm in the same boat as you... the only time I've had to actually sign documents have been: 1) When I bought my house 2) When I refinanced the mortgage
You need to make the identical squiggle approximately 100 times in a row.
Oh, also, once I got a ballot rejected because the signature on the ballot didn't match the one in my voter registration-- that I signed 10 years previously. (I live where voting is by mail.) It wasn't a major election, so I just ignored it, and in more recent elections they either haven't checked, or haven't cared. (Or, more cynically, my ballot never got opened.)
Thank you for conceding that point. There are four 'things' (3 panes and a ribbon) on the four sides of the Outlook which reduce the space available for displaying emails. And they behave in four different ways. That's all I'm trying to say.
If that were true, I'd sympathize. But it's not. And I've already explained why it's not. And it's not sinking in.
Depending on formatting and length of the message header (subject, To: CC:), I'm able to see up to 3 lines of the email body at a time.
That's not an acceptable configuration in my mind, and it's not the way I work. I have dual monitors (17 and 19 inch widescreens).
3 lines of email at a time, on a 17" monitor? Liar. How does it feel to have your pants constantly on fire?
So we're at a point in the conversation where 1) you aren't actually absorbing any information I provide, and 2) you're blatantly lying to me. I think it's time to end this thread. Good bye.
Contribution isn't just about programming. A feature request is contribution. Documenting how you used the software to achieve something and sharing that is contribution. Even a good clear bug report is a contribution. All of these things can make the software more useful, no programming required.
In theory, yes.
In reality, no.
Feature requests are ignored. Bugs are ignored. (There are some exceptions, of course, but as a general rule open source projects are disastrous at considering feature requests and bugs that don't have accompanying source code.)
I don't recall there being a People pane in Outlook 2003, so your suggestion that the controls would be in same place for 2010 as for 2003 didn't make sense to me. Did a little Google. Turns out...the "Social Connector" was in 2003, and the option to hide it was under the View menu. Well, learn something new every day.
It's not new, it's been there the entire time. The only difference is that View changed from a menu into a ribbon tab.
When I open Outlook, I want to manage my email, not learn about Outlook.
Fair enough, but you didn't magically know how the menus and icons in 2003 worked, right? So why would you expect to magically know how the ribbon works? If you don't spend any time learning it, exploring it, then of course you won't know how to work it-- I see this as a tautology, but for some reason ribbon detractors don't.
Now I know how to hide the People pane. Something I will never need to do again. So how is it useful for me to learn the location of a button I will click once?
What you should have learned isn't "this is where you click to close the People Pane", what you should have learned is, "the View menu/tab contains options for turning off panes." Learn the mnemonic!
If you had learned the mnemonic in 2003, you wouldn't have been confused when trying to turn off the People Pane in 2010 because (and I know I'm hammering on this point, but it's important) the mnemonic did not change.
Right-click the ribbon, get context menu which includes 'minimize' (which hides the ribbon). Right-click To-Do, get context menu, which includes 'off' (which hides the To-Do pane). Right-click People pane, nothing. No context menu.
Yes, all correct.
Click the chevron for the ribbon, ribbon gone. Click the chevron for the folders (Navigation pane), folders gone. Click the chevron for the People pane, pane smaller, but still there.
Wrong; the chevron minimizes, it does not remove. That behavior is consistent no matter where the chevron icon appears. (And think about it: it wouldn't make any sense to be able to turn the ribbon off, because you'd never be able to get it back on! Not without reinstalling.)
If you have a copy of Outlook where the Folder Pane chevron turns the folder list off, then you have a strange mutant indeed. But more likely, you're either lying to support your case, or an extremely unobservant person.
To say there's any sort of consistency or logic to the way these panes work just is not true.
The only inconsistency is that the To-Do Pane includes a contextual menu and the others dont. (I don't know if I'd count the ribbon, since it's not a "Pane" by Outlook's definition of "Pane".) Other than that, they all behave identically.
But when I can hide A, B, and C without going to the View tab, I don't see how you can argue that for D obviously my first stop should have been the View tab.
But you didn't hide A, B and C; you just minimized them. You're comparing apples and oranges.
Nav, Person, To-Do panes can be controlled from the View tab in the ribbon; the ribbon itself is not.
Arguably, the ribbon should have an entry for itself in the View tab, allowing you to minimize it. (As pointed out above, you can't turn the ribbon off like you can the other panes.)
This People pane irks me especially for a couple reasons. First, there should be a learning curve, not a learning cliff. I expect on opening Outlook I should be able to send and read email.
So the People Pane was preventing you from sending and receiving email? Seriously? You're full of shit, and the longer this conversation goes, the more full of shit you get.
The second thing is, of what use is this People pane? The ribbon, I understand why it's there. I'm not a fan of the design. I will likely leave the ribbon hidden in most of my Office 2010 apps. But I understand why there's a ribbon and what I would use it for. The To-Do pane in Outlook, an
Thank you! That worked. And it does make sense (now that I know how to do it).
It worked, it makes sense, and it's IN THE EXACT SAME SPOT THAT FUNCTION WAS IN BEFORE. If you couldn't find it in the ribbon View tab, why in hell do you think you would have been able to find it in the View menu? You're whining about your own ignorance, not anything relevant to Outlook's UI.
no, this is nothing like any other app I've worked with. It's not even consistent with itself.
It's pretty damned consistent, let's see your evidence:
I want to hide the ribbon. How do I do that? Oh, that's easy. There's this little chevron pointing up in the top-right corner of the ribbon. Click that, ribbon goes up. Chevron becomes down arrow. Click that, ribbon comes back down.
That folder list on the left side have a similar left-pointing chevron. Click that, folder list disappears to the left. Chevron now points right. Click again, and folder list comes back.
People pane? Well, obviously that's in the View menu!
In my copy of Outlook, the People Pane has the exact same chevron, which behaves in the exact same way. (The minimize/maximize it.) To hide it completely you use the View tab. Let's see, what if you wanted to hide the Folder Pane completely instead of just minimizing it... lo and behold, you do that from the View tab as well! Looks pretty fucking consistent to me.
(The irony here is that there is an inconsistency in Outlook's UI, the Reading Pane doesn't have the minimize chevron that all other panes to have. But somehow you didn't notice that, and instead complained about the People Pane which is entirely consistent with the rest of the UI. WTF?)
Seriously, usually with side panes like that, the controls are right in the pane. Up/Down or Left/Right arrows to open and close. Thumbtack to pin the pane down. X to close.
Yeah; it used to be that way in Office 2003. Things have changed. Cope.
I go the view tab of the ribbon in Outlook. Where's the control to hide the ribbon?
Same place it always is? I don't get your point.
How about the To-Do bar on the right side? Oh, so there is a control for that in the View ribbon, right next to the control for the people pane. So how did I get rid of the To-Do bar without seeing the control for the people pane?
You click "To-Do Bar" in the View tab and select "Off". It's entirely separate from the People Pane, both can be turned on or off individually. Did you actually try any of this before posting? Because you're starting to look like an idiot.
Because if you open the To-Do bar, you'll see 1) It has the left/right arrows to minimize.
No it doesn't.
And 2) You can right-click for a menu, which include the option to turn it off.
This one is true, and a little weird. Congratulations, you've pointed out an actual inconsistency.
Go to the People pane, and it has up/down arrows, but they don't work the same way the ribbon arrows or folder pane arrows work. And no right-click menu.
What "up down arrows"? Do you mean the chevron icon that minimizes/restores the pane? If so, it works identically to that chevron icon every where else it appears.
So how is this obvious? How it is logical design when I could do what I wanted to do for every other pane without going to the View tab?
The To-Do Pane is the only one with that contextual menu; if you wanted to remove the Folder Pane or Reading Pane or People Pane you have to use the View tab in the ribbon. To-Do is the odd man out here, not the normal case.
So honestly, using my experience with Outlook 2010, based on the ribbon, the folders pane, the To-Do pane, it never occurred to me to look in the View tab.
Well then you're an idiot. You explore to learn. You've never explored the UI, so you've never learned the UI. Then you come here to Slashdot and gripe about it as if it's Microsoft's faul
When Vista came along I figured I'd best learn how to use it as it was. I loved the Quick Launch buttons
You know Quick Launch was in Windows XP too, right? (Actually I think it goes back to WIndows 98...)
and especially the "Show Desktop" button (I have a bad habit of putting a lot of files on my desktop so I can find them quickly, then remove them when they are no longer useful.)
That was in XP as well. Maybe if you hadn't spent so much effort making XP behave like Windows 2000, you'd have found these great features 5 years earlier.
Win7 removed the Quick Launch (found a hack to put it back)
You don't need a "hack", the launch toolbar is still built-in to Explorer, they just didn't create a Quick Launch toolbar by default. You have to make your own instead. At least I hope you're not using some poorly-written buggy "hack" that does nothing but duplicate a feature Explorer already has...
It still takes a while to find the things that I don't know the keyboard shortcuts for.
More or less time than in Office 2003?
Real productivity waster.
You come at me with a stopwatch and some real data, and I might be inclined to believe you. So far, every study done on the ribbon shows it as being significantly more efficient (i.e. fewer clicks to perform task, more discoverable, etc.) than the toolbar/menu mess in Office 2003.
There's a pretty famous CLI vs. GUI study in computer science, where users felt they were accomplishing tasks much faster in the CLI than the GUI, but the stopwatch showed the exact opposite. Your perception is not data. Your emotion ("I hate the ribbon") is not data. You bring data, you convince me.
Otherwise it's just noise from creatures of habit who hate change.
Do I hate GUI's?
No, you just hate change.
The first job of a UI designer is to identify the people who are only complaining because they hate change, and eliminate them from consideration-- because no matter what you do, no matter how superior it is, they'll bitch and moan. And the bitching and moaning adds up to so much noise, it's impossible to tell if you're improving the product or not. Which is exactly what happens here on Slashdot whenever talk of the ribbon comes up.
But the machine that I spend nearly 10 hours a day working with I still stumble around trying to figure out why the heck Microsoft hid whatever function I was trying to use.
So take a day and learn it. You didn't "magically" come to know where all the functions in the toolbars and menus were, you either took a course on it in school or spent months exploring the interface to find them. So spend some time exploring the ribbon in the same way. Show the world that your brain isn't a carved slab of marble, but is still capable of learning new things.
I admit I don't understand people who don't like the ribbon, but I *really* don't understand people who find the ribbon confusing. It uses the exact sane mnemonics as the menu that came before it! If it's something you would have found in the View menu in Office 2003, odds are it's in the View ribbon in Office 2010. And, oh look, there it fucking is!
So honestly, using your experience with past UIs, where exactly would you have expected to find the function "turn the people pane off"? If you were a UI designer at Microsoft, and were forced at gunpoint to design a ribbon, where would you have put that function?
Not in a solid decade. More, really... Apple stopped worrying about UI guidelines near the end of the Classic era (remember Quicktime Player 3.0?), and they've never given a crap in the OS X era.
There were reams and reams of materials written to come up with some consensus as to when you should use a "metal" window as opposed to an "aqua" window, but it all summed to, "shrug, nobody knows!"
It's kind of hard to take him seriously when he claims the menu bar has been "made bigger and more prominent", right underneath a screenshot showing that Windows 8 Explorer doesn't have any menu bar at all!
But my main point is that addons are not broken. I'm using the exact same addons I used in Firefox 3 - I should know because I didn't download new ones. All you have to do is open the xpi in e.g. 7zip or winrar,
You have a great deadpan. Oh wait, you're serious?
It's worth noting that Mozilla is still far, far better than pretty much every open source project ever at managing its bug database.
Chromium developers don't even pretend to use the bug database. Even bugs here at Slashdot are utterly ignored 95% of the time.
"Saying we value bug reports and then ignoring our bug database" is pretty much standard operating procedure in the open source world. Kudos on Tyler Downer for making a stand.
The paragraph indent is in the ruler, where it is in every word processor ever.
Select the styles you want, then move the paragraph indent marker. That's it, you're done. If you don't want indents on titles or examples, just make sure those styles aren't selected-- they'll stay un-indented.
There's no way this should have taken 10 minutes if you've ever used any word processing program before.
Good luck finding it with Microsoft changing their menus, especially the _huge_ change with the MS-Office2007 "ribbon". It might be good (???), but change comes at a cost. Very uncertain there is a payoff.
You know the entire point of the Ribbon is to solve this particular problem?
The impetus for developing it came when Microsoft was reviewing feature requests for the next version of Office-- and noticed that the vast majority of feature requests were for features Office already had but users couldn't figure out how to find. The Ribbon was designed to solve that problem.
Of course geeks hate it, which is why Microsoft doesn't put geeky people in charge of usability (thank God.) But all the research so far shows that, while it does have a few warts, it's by-and-large accomplishing the goal.
In any case, 1) It's not going away 2) It's inspiring a lot of other applications to create similar UIs, for example, all current web browsers So it's time for geeks to stop whining and just get used to it already.
Their actions accomplish nothing, and if they had even a basic understanding that the motor must warm up before the heating system will be able to blow warm air, they might use the system in a rational manner.
I have a friend who bought a dirt-cheap Kia that actually had a fast-working heating element in the heater, so it could spit out heat right away without waiting for the engine. This was in a ~$8,000 car, seriously bottom-of-the-line super economy car.
I've never, never found this feature in another car, even those that cost 5 times as much. My car cost three times as much, and is several years newer, and I have to wait for my engine to warm up, like a chump.
What the hell, car makers? I live in Washington State; I need a goddamned fast-working heater! Why is Kia, of all companies, cornering this particular feature?
I also made acquaintance for the first time with the amusing "simplified" menu system of Word that made it very hard to find the option to change the paragraph indentation in less then 10 minutes.
Uh, you drag the "indent" marker in the ruler, like every other GUI Word Processor... ever since the beginning of time ever.
That took 10 minutes to figure out? Seriously? Or you're exaggerating, because you are some open source fan trying to make Microsoft products look bad? (Because if the latter, you're just making yourself look dumb.)
There's always an achievement for "completed the game", and most games have incremental achievements as well "completed mission 1, completed mission 2, etc".
Which leaves two possibilities: 1) Either you're so unclever that it never occurred to you that achievements can be used for this purpose, or 2) You're such an old fogey that you don't know how achievements work. In either case, why are you on this forum?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not commenting on the article in general (well, I am but in another thread-- look it up if you care), I was just countering your ludicrously ignorant claim that mail order did not cause a paradigm shift in the US economy.
Because it was ludicrously ignorant.
I'm contributing to the conversation by educating you, and anybody else who was dumb enough to have taken your ludicrously ignorant statement at face value.
They're just going to use the year to close out the contentious distribution center in CA and move it somewhere else... Nevada, or Oregon, or Arizona. That would eliminate this particular headache, and compliant to Federal Law (which CA can't do anything about) allow them to resume selling tax-free in CA, since they'll no longer have a physical presence in the state.
Mail order did not introduce a paradigm shift in the economy the way the internet has.
Bullshit! The western half of the United States was built on the Sears mail order catalog. Literally in some cases-- they sold kit houses!
Maybe learn some history and rejoin the conversation, huh?
Try buying a house. They'll complain.
I'm in the same boat as you... the only time I've had to actually sign documents have been:
1) When I bought my house
2) When I refinanced the mortgage
You need to make the identical squiggle approximately 100 times in a row.
Oh, also, once I got a ballot rejected because the signature on the ballot didn't match the one in my voter registration-- that I signed 10 years previously. (I live where voting is by mail.) It wasn't a major election, so I just ignored it, and in more recent elections they either haven't checked, or haven't cared. (Or, more cynically, my ballot never got opened.)
Thank you for conceding that point. There are four 'things' (3 panes and a ribbon) on the four sides of the Outlook which reduce the space available for displaying emails. And they behave in four different ways. That's all I'm trying to say.
If that were true, I'd sympathize. But it's not. And I've already explained why it's not. And it's not sinking in.
Depending on formatting and length of the message header (subject, To: CC:), I'm able to see up to 3 lines of the email body at a time.
That's not an acceptable configuration in my mind, and it's not the way I work. I have dual monitors (17 and 19 inch widescreens).
3 lines of email at a time, on a 17" monitor? Liar. How does it feel to have your pants constantly on fire?
So we're at a point in the conversation where 1) you aren't actually absorbing any information I provide, and 2) you're blatantly lying to me. I think it's time to end this thread. Good bye.
Contribution isn't just about programming. A feature request is contribution. Documenting how you used the software to achieve something and sharing that is contribution. Even a good clear bug report is a contribution. All of these things can make the software more useful, no programming required.
In theory, yes.
In reality, no.
Feature requests are ignored. Bugs are ignored. (There are some exceptions, of course, but as a general rule open source projects are disastrous at considering feature requests and bugs that don't have accompanying source code.)
I don't recall there being a People pane in Outlook 2003, so your suggestion that the controls would be in same place for 2010 as for 2003 didn't make sense to me. Did a little Google. Turns out...the "Social Connector" was in 2003, and the option to hide it was under the View menu. Well, learn something new every day.
It's not new, it's been there the entire time. The only difference is that View changed from a menu into a ribbon tab.
When I open Outlook, I want to manage my email, not learn about Outlook.
Fair enough, but you didn't magically know how the menus and icons in 2003 worked, right? So why would you expect to magically know how the ribbon works? If you don't spend any time learning it, exploring it, then of course you won't know how to work it-- I see this as a tautology, but for some reason ribbon detractors don't.
Now I know how to hide the People pane. Something I will never need to do again. So how is it useful for me to learn the location of a button I will click once?
What you should have learned isn't "this is where you click to close the People Pane", what you should have learned is, "the View menu/tab contains options for turning off panes." Learn the mnemonic!
If you had learned the mnemonic in 2003, you wouldn't have been confused when trying to turn off the People Pane in 2010 because (and I know I'm hammering on this point, but it's important) the mnemonic did not change.
Right-click the ribbon, get context menu which includes 'minimize' (which hides the ribbon). Right-click To-Do, get context menu, which includes 'off' (which hides the To-Do pane). Right-click People pane, nothing. No context menu.
Yes, all correct.
Click the chevron for the ribbon, ribbon gone. Click the chevron for the folders (Navigation pane), folders gone. Click the chevron for the People pane, pane smaller, but still there.
Wrong; the chevron minimizes, it does not remove. That behavior is consistent no matter where the chevron icon appears. (And think about it: it wouldn't make any sense to be able to turn the ribbon off, because you'd never be able to get it back on! Not without reinstalling.)
If you have a copy of Outlook where the Folder Pane chevron turns the folder list off, then you have a strange mutant indeed. But more likely, you're either lying to support your case, or an extremely unobservant person.
To say there's any sort of consistency or logic to the way these panes work just is not true.
The only inconsistency is that the To-Do Pane includes a contextual menu and the others dont. (I don't know if I'd count the ribbon, since it's not a "Pane" by Outlook's definition of "Pane".) Other than that, they all behave identically.
But when I can hide A, B, and C without going to the View tab, I don't see how you can argue that for D obviously my first stop should have been the View tab.
But you didn't hide A, B and C; you just minimized them. You're comparing apples and oranges.
Nav, Person, To-Do panes can be controlled from the View tab in the ribbon; the ribbon itself is not.
Arguably, the ribbon should have an entry for itself in the View tab, allowing you to minimize it. (As pointed out above, you can't turn the ribbon off like you can the other panes.)
This People pane irks me especially for a couple reasons. First, there should be a learning curve, not a learning cliff. I expect on opening Outlook I should be able to send and read email.
So the People Pane was preventing you from sending and receiving email? Seriously? You're full of shit, and the longer this conversation goes, the more full of shit you get.
The second thing is, of what use is this People pane? The ribbon, I understand why it's there. I'm not a fan of the design. I will likely leave the ribbon hidden in most of my Office 2010 apps. But I understand why there's a ribbon and what I would use it for. The To-Do pane in Outlook, an
Thank you! That worked. And it does make sense (now that I know how to do it).
It worked, it makes sense, and it's IN THE EXACT SAME SPOT THAT FUNCTION WAS IN BEFORE. If you couldn't find it in the ribbon View tab, why in hell do you think you would have been able to find it in the View menu? You're whining about your own ignorance, not anything relevant to Outlook's UI.
no, this is nothing like any other app I've worked with. It's not even consistent with itself.
It's pretty damned consistent, let's see your evidence:
I want to hide the ribbon. How do I do that? Oh, that's easy. There's this little chevron pointing up in the top-right corner of the ribbon. Click that, ribbon goes up. Chevron becomes down arrow. Click that, ribbon comes back down.
That folder list on the left side have a similar left-pointing chevron. Click that, folder list disappears to the left. Chevron now points right. Click again, and folder list comes back.
People pane? Well, obviously that's in the View menu!
In my copy of Outlook, the People Pane has the exact same chevron, which behaves in the exact same way. (The minimize/maximize it.) To hide it completely you use the View tab. Let's see, what if you wanted to hide the Folder Pane completely instead of just minimizing it... lo and behold, you do that from the View tab as well! Looks pretty fucking consistent to me.
(The irony here is that there is an inconsistency in Outlook's UI, the Reading Pane doesn't have the minimize chevron that all other panes to have. But somehow you didn't notice that, and instead complained about the People Pane which is entirely consistent with the rest of the UI. WTF?)
Seriously, usually with side panes like that, the controls are right in the pane. Up/Down or Left/Right arrows to open and close. Thumbtack to pin the pane down. X to close.
Yeah; it used to be that way in Office 2003. Things have changed. Cope.
I go the view tab of the ribbon in Outlook. Where's the control to hide the ribbon?
Same place it always is? I don't get your point.
How about the To-Do bar on the right side? Oh, so there is a control for that in the View ribbon, right next to the control for the people pane. So how did I get rid of the To-Do bar without seeing the control for the people pane?
You click "To-Do Bar" in the View tab and select "Off". It's entirely separate from the People Pane, both can be turned on or off individually. Did you actually try any of this before posting? Because you're starting to look like an idiot.
Because if you open the To-Do bar, you'll see 1) It has the left/right arrows to minimize.
No it doesn't.
And 2) You can right-click for a menu, which include the option to turn it off.
This one is true, and a little weird. Congratulations, you've pointed out an actual inconsistency.
Go to the People pane, and it has up/down arrows, but they don't work the same way the ribbon arrows or folder pane arrows work. And no right-click menu.
What "up down arrows"? Do you mean the chevron icon that minimizes/restores the pane? If so, it works identically to that chevron icon every where else it appears.
So how is this obvious? How it is logical design when I could do what I wanted to do for every other pane without going to the View tab?
The To-Do Pane is the only one with that contextual menu; if you wanted to remove the Folder Pane or Reading Pane or People Pane you have to use the View tab in the ribbon. To-Do is the odd man out here, not the normal case.
So honestly, using my experience with Outlook 2010, based on the ribbon, the folders pane, the To-Do pane, it never occurred to me to look in the View tab.
Well then you're an idiot. You explore to learn. You've never explored the UI, so you've never learned the UI. Then you come here to Slashdot and gripe about it as if it's Microsoft's faul
I hated XP and made it work like 2000.
Translation: "I hate change."
When Vista came along I figured I'd best learn how to use it as it was. I loved the Quick Launch buttons
You know Quick Launch was in Windows XP too, right? (Actually I think it goes back to WIndows 98...)
and especially the "Show Desktop" button (I have a bad habit of putting a lot of files on my desktop so I can find them quickly, then remove them when they are no longer useful.)
That was in XP as well. Maybe if you hadn't spent so much effort making XP behave like Windows 2000, you'd have found these great features 5 years earlier.
Win7 removed the Quick Launch (found a hack to put it back)
You don't need a "hack", the launch toolbar is still built-in to Explorer, they just didn't create a Quick Launch toolbar by default. You have to make your own instead. At least I hope you're not using some poorly-written buggy "hack" that does nothing but duplicate a feature Explorer already has...
It still takes a while to find the things that I don't know the keyboard shortcuts for.
More or less time than in Office 2003?
Real productivity waster.
You come at me with a stopwatch and some real data, and I might be inclined to believe you. So far, every study done on the ribbon shows it as being significantly more efficient (i.e. fewer clicks to perform task, more discoverable, etc.) than the toolbar/menu mess in Office 2003.
There's a pretty famous CLI vs. GUI study in computer science, where users felt they were accomplishing tasks much faster in the CLI than the GUI, but the stopwatch showed the exact opposite. Your perception is not data. Your emotion ("I hate the ribbon") is not data. You bring data, you convince me.
Otherwise it's just noise from creatures of habit who hate change.
Do I hate GUI's?
No, you just hate change.
The first job of a UI designer is to identify the people who are only complaining because they hate change, and eliminate them from consideration-- because no matter what you do, no matter how superior it is, they'll bitch and moan. And the bitching and moaning adds up to so much noise, it's impossible to tell if you're improving the product or not. Which is exactly what happens here on Slashdot whenever talk of the ribbon comes up.
But the machine that I spend nearly 10 hours a day working with I still stumble around trying to figure out why the heck Microsoft hid whatever function I was trying to use.
So take a day and learn it. You didn't "magically" come to know where all the functions in the toolbars and menus were, you either took a course on it in school or spent months exploring the interface to find them. So spend some time exploring the ribbon in the same way. Show the world that your brain isn't a carved slab of marble, but is still capable of learning new things.
Who knows, you might like it.
... and? What's your point?
The car is generally considered the replacement for a horse and buggy, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing.
but I can't hide that damn people pane.
It's in the View ribbon. View - People Pane - Off
I admit I don't understand people who don't like the ribbon, but I *really* don't understand people who find the ribbon confusing. It uses the exact sane mnemonics as the menu that came before it! If it's something you would have found in the View menu in Office 2003, odds are it's in the View ribbon in Office 2010. And, oh look, there it fucking is!
So honestly, using your experience with past UIs, where exactly would you have expected to find the function "turn the people pane off"? If you were a UI designer at Microsoft, and were forced at gunpoint to design a ribbon, where would you have put that function?
Has Slashdot's core audience shifted away from geeks and nerds?
Slashdot posters:
1) Hate Microsoft
2) Hate GUIs
3) Hate making software usable for the common man
4) Hate change
What about Slashdot led you to believe people here would like and embrace the Ribbon interface?
Most of the people outraged have never used it, in any case. It's just noise.
Not in a solid decade. More, really... Apple stopped worrying about UI guidelines near the end of the Classic era (remember Quicktime Player 3.0?), and they've never given a crap in the OS X era.
There were reams and reams of materials written to come up with some consensus as to when you should use a "metal" window as opposed to an "aqua" window, but it all summed to, "shrug, nobody knows!"
It's kind of hard to take him seriously when he claims the menu bar has been "made bigger and more prominent", right underneath a screenshot showing that Windows 8 Explorer doesn't have any menu bar at all!
You have a great deadpan. Oh wait, you're serious?
Holy Christ.
It's worth noting that Mozilla is still far, far better than pretty much every open source project ever at managing its bug database.
Chromium developers don't even pretend to use the bug database. Even bugs here at Slashdot are utterly ignored 95% of the time.
"Saying we value bug reports and then ignoring our bug database" is pretty much standard operating procedure in the open source world. Kudos on Tyler Downer for making a stand.
The paragraph indent is in the ruler, where it is in every word processor ever.
Select the styles you want, then move the paragraph indent marker. That's it, you're done. If you don't want indents on titles or examples, just make sure those styles aren't selected-- they'll stay un-indented.
There's no way this should have taken 10 minutes if you've ever used any word processing program before.
You know the entire point of the Ribbon is to solve this particular problem?
The impetus for developing it came when Microsoft was reviewing feature requests for the next version of Office-- and noticed that the vast majority of feature requests were for features Office already had but users couldn't figure out how to find. The Ribbon was designed to solve that problem.
Of course geeks hate it, which is why Microsoft doesn't put geeky people in charge of usability (thank God.) But all the research so far shows that, while it does have a few warts, it's by-and-large accomplishing the goal.
In any case,
1) It's not going away
2) It's inspiring a lot of other applications to create similar UIs, for example, all current web browsers
So it's time for geeks to stop whining and just get used to it already.
I have a friend who bought a dirt-cheap Kia that actually had a fast-working heating element in the heater, so it could spit out heat right away without waiting for the engine. This was in a ~$8,000 car, seriously bottom-of-the-line super economy car.
I've never, never found this feature in another car, even those that cost 5 times as much. My car cost three times as much, and is several years newer, and I have to wait for my engine to warm up, like a chump.
What the hell, car makers? I live in Washington State; I need a goddamned fast-working heater! Why is Kia, of all companies, cornering this particular feature?
Uh, you drag the "indent" marker in the ruler, like every other GUI Word Processor... ever since the beginning of time ever.
That took 10 minutes to figure out? Seriously? Or you're exaggerating, because you are some open source fan trying to make Microsoft products look bad? (Because if the latter, you're just making yourself look dumb.)
Achievements, duh.
There's always an achievement for "completed the game", and most games have incremental achievements as well "completed mission 1, completed mission 2, etc".
Which leaves two possibilities:
1) Either you're so unclever that it never occurred to you that achievements can be used for this purpose, or
2) You're such an old fogey that you don't know how achievements work.
In either case, why are you on this forum?
Caeser was a human actor. Doing your performance in a motion-capture rig in 2011 is no different than doing your performance in a rubber mask in 1967.
Every single Wikipedia article: "why aren't you using jQuery you idiot!"
Still, the StackExchange community is more healthy than Wikipedia's, but it still has a ton of groupthink issues.
There's a hundred possibilities, but in the 5 years or so this problem has been apparent, Wikipedia has tried exactly zero of them.
At this point, it's a lost cause.
Yeah but that doesn't say anything about "you can't have your installer also install malware."
My point is that if you don't want something to happen, put it in the license. If it's not in the license, it's fair game.