Comment by IlikeKitties
9 days ago
I never understood the issue with the ribbon UI. Epecially for Office it was great, so much easier to find stuff.
9 days ago
I never understood the issue with the ribbon UI. Epecially for Office it was great, so much easier to find stuff.
> I never understood the issue with the ribbon UI. Epecially for Office it was great, so much easier to find stuff.
1. I don't need to find stuff.
I knew where stuff is.
2. I read text. I only need menus. I don't need toolbars etc. and so I turn them all off.
I cannot read icons. I have to guess. It's like searching for 3 things I need in an unfamiliar supermarket.
3. Menus are very space efficient.
Ribbons hog precious vertical space. This is doubly disastrous on widescreens.
4. I am a keyboard user.
I use keys to navigate menus. It's much faster than aiming at targets with the mouse and I don't need to look. The navigation keys don't work any more.
Ribbons help those who don't know what they are doing and do not care about speed and efficiency.
They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
> They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
The problem is, most users are utterly braindead, they barely manage to type at speed instead of pecking at single keys. The astonishment I've gotten in some places for literally nothing more than Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V is more than enough proof.
That's also IMHO a large portion of why Linux never really took off on desktop. UX/UI people are rare enough to begin with, most of them don't work on FOSS in their free time, and so development is primarily done by nerds for nerds. That's great if you already know something about the application - but usually the learning curve is so steep that most users frustratedly give up. And documentation is either not existing, incomplete or horribly outdated, and StackOverflow etc. are even worse.
The exception is Blender. They got some serious money IIRC, cleaned up their act, and now there's a headline of some movie or game using Blender every few weeks.
100% true.
The sad thing is that Windows has a great keyboard UI and it's superbly accessible for people with visual and motor disabilities.
Who have reduced earning opportunities because they are disabled, so FOSS should be great for them, but it isn't, because the nerds don't know CUA and don't know the keyboard UI. They spend their time mastering a couple of ancient apps like Vi and Emacs and ignore the fiery furnace of UI R&D that followed for the next 20Y after those early efforts.
Learn Windows' keyboard UI and you can drive the whole OS and all its apps with the speed of a genius Vim user with 20 years' practice. It makes Emacs look like a wet paper pad and a burned stick compared to a Moleskine notebook and a top quality fountain pen.
Xfce comes close and implements maybe 75% of the UI but once you are in an app all bets are off.
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> And documentation is either not existing, incomplete or horribly outdated, and StackOverflow etc. are even worse.
Or the documentation is very complete, but only useful if you read and comprehend it in its entirety. Open source devs need to understand that not everyone using their software wants to become an expert in it. They just want to get a task done and the software is facilitating completing that task. That is something totally normal and those users should not be thought of as less important than the power users.
> The problem is, most users are utterly braindead
Yeah, that's Microsoft's idea. All user are idiots. That's why they are not able to fix bugs but only change the UI.
Just hide the ribbon.
On a Mac, that's fine. On Windows, it's not, because then I can't control the app any more.
I have been using Word since version 4 on DOS and version 5 on Classic MacOS. On Windows, I used WinWord 1, 2, 6, 95, 97, 2000, XP and 2003... then 4 years later MS ripped out the UI I knew backwards and had known for about 16 years, since 1991, and replaced it with one inferior in every way for me.
I'm not denying it might be better for others but for me it's now a waste of disk space.
The old versions do all I need, so I keep them. For everything except Word, there is LibreOffice.
But LibreOffice Writer has no outline mode, and I am a writer: that is THE killer function of Word for me.
So, Word 97 under WINE on Linux and Word 2003 when I have to use Win10 or -- shudder -- Win11.
And it'll be back in the next update.
My big problem with it is that it’s stateful. A menu or toolbar admits muscle memory - since you get used to where a certain button or option is and you can find it easily. With ribbons you need to know if you’re in the right submenu first.
Though personally, I’m increasingly delighted by the quicksilver - style palette / action tools that vscode and IntelliJ use for infrequently used options. Just hit the hotkey and type, and the option you want appears under the enter key.
It's not easily customizable and it takes more space, not much to understand
I'm not sure it takes more space than a menu and toolbar, but regardless, monitors are a LOT larger now than in 2003 so...
Frankly, I'm motivated sure customizing is a win either. I fo a lot of remote support and it's nice to have a consistent interface.
Personally I find it faster than menus, and easier to find things I seldom use.
But I appreciate it's a personal taste thing, and some older folks prefer older interfaces.
Your monitors, those of a well-off power user, may have become larger. Most regular users I've seen are on 15" laptops with screens at 1366×768, or (if they're lucky) 1920×1080 with scaling at 1.25× or so. 17" desktop monitors used to be commonplace about 20 years ago.
The slightly larger screen real estate (if any) is more than wasted by very inefficient "modern UIs" where you won't find paddings smaller than 16px, with three buttons where there used to be enough space for 9.
Just compare and become sure! The larger screen isn't a good excuse to waste space either.
And users are way more important than the tiny group of tech support.
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Those of us working in jobs use the same couple of functions in our office products. We don't really go and find features.