While browsing my referrer logs I noticed a lot of hits from a comment on Jensen Harris's blog post about the Office 2007 UI being licenced. Below is the comment which has driven several hundred page views on my blog
My reason for moving to a ribbon-like interface for the Phoenix release of RSS Bandit was because I was under the impression that the Ribbon was the wave of the future with regards to application user interfaces in Windows. However I just read a blog post by Mike Torres entitled More on the Office 2007 UI where he points out that practically every Windows application released by Microsoft this year has abandoned the traditional File menu and toolbar structure in a different way. Below are links to the screenshots from Mike's post [and one extra which was suggested by Omar]
- Office 2007
- Windows Media Player 11
- Windows Live Messenger 8
- Windows Photo Gallery
- Windows Live Mail Desktop
- Internet Explorer 7
As you can se all of the above applications which where shipped by Microsoft this year embraced the idea of getting rid of the traditional File menu and toolbars yet didn't agree on what to replace them with. As a developer of a Windows application, it is clear to me that the traditional yet consistent File menu and toolbar look is now played out on Windows. The main question is which app I should emulate. If history tells me anything, I can't go wrong betting on Office driving user expectations around what Windows applications should act and feel like. I'm glad to see Infragistics on the list of vendors who will be adopting the Office 2007 UI guidelines. This means we'll likely inherit some best practices around using the Office 2007 Ribbon for free since we now use the Infragistics NetAdvantage GUI components in RSS Bandit.
If this means, I'm going to get people like Mike Dimmick flaming me for not living up to the vision of the 'Ribbon' then so be it. I'd rather that than an application that looked old and busted instead of being the new hotness. ;)