[Not so OT] MS Office UI Developments

[xavier.bury at clearstream.com]

Scott, 

that's funny, we had a meeting with our MS TAM (tech. account mgr) for our 
MS support contract.
His presentation was made in Office 12 beta (never crashed) - and his 
words struck me as quite
funny - MS imposes new products on the poor MS employees PC - "they should 
eat their own dog
food" he said was the inhouse policy...

We just saw powerpoint's UI briefly before the presentation he made. The 
UI is definitely simpler
although some things seemed out of place (tabs in toolbars for example). 

My feeling remains the same, it was nothing we couldn't do in rev ;)

Menus with a WinXP or newer UI do need a custom stack menu approach but it 
is not impossible.

What is missing in rev is making that menu stack API a bit more 
interactive or rev-event capable
so we can add revolutionaries' intelligence ;)

just a thought
---------------------=---------------------
Xavier Bury
Clearstream Services
TNS NT LAN Server


use-revolution-bounces at lists.runrev.com wrote on 14/12/2005 09:11:03:

> Tonight the local CHI meeting, I listened to a presentation by Jensen
> Harris, a key designer behind the new Microsoft Office user interface. 
He
> presented a history of Word and Office and how it evolved into Office 
2003,
> and then went into a live demo of the new office apps sporting the 
ribbon
> interface and contextual interaction.  Mr. Harris acknowledged they (MS) 
are
> taking a risk in changing the UI/interaction of the apps.  And it was 
great
> to hear someone so close to the project speak in detail about how it's
> supposed to work and why they chose to do what they're doing.
> 
> A couple of things jumped out at me while watching the presentation:
> 
> 1) the Runtime guys were on a similar track with their
> somewhat-context-sensitive inspector thing (but there are way too many
> sub-level choices to be made in the palette)
> 
> 2) the fact that Rev developers can create rich menus by using stacks 
would
> seem to bode well for a future of making apps that run alongside the 
Office
> experience (regardless of how valid you think MS's UI direction is)
> 
> In the last few minutes of his talk, Mr. Harris demoed a UI treatment 
that I
> personally find very interesting and appealing: a floating contextual
> palette of sorts.  Initially it comes up ghosted (translucent), 
positioned
> out of the way from the item you are editing; the palette gets more 
opaque
> as you mouse toward it, and becomes more transparent as you mouse away 
from
> it.  Pretty cool stuff.
> 
> There were a lot of good points made, and one that was quite refreshing 
to
> hear:
> 
>   "Remove to simplify."
> 
> I wrote down a bunch of points that seemed like they might worth 
posting,
> but Mr. Harris also has a blog where you can read his personal comments
> about development of the project: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Scott Rossi
> Creative Director
> Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
> -----
> E: scott at tactilemedia.com
> W: http://www.tactilemedia.com


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