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Ribbonizing OpenOffice.orgRibbonizing OpenOffice.org
A next-iteration design for OpenOffice.org's interface is being floated, and it looks like ... get this ... Microsoft Office 2007.</p>
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A next-iteration design for OpenOffice.org's interface is being floated, and it looks like ... get this ... Microsoft Office 2007.
Under the headline "Project Renaissance", the search for OO.o's new UI closed its prototyping phase at the end of July, and a mockup of the new design went public on Sun's GullFOSS blog. The comments ranged from "wow, I'm going to like this" to "what in the heck are you people doing":
Some sample negative comments:
The ribbon is for absolute morons. In fact I use OpenOffice at work because they moved to Office 2007 and I just can't stand that STUPID interface for idiots. OpenOffice needs to stop trying to be Office and just grow it's own set of b___s and be itself. Ooo is stuck in this prepubescent world between nearly finished application and some wild dorm experience that only gets hacked when the participants sober up enough to give a s__t. [*]
... aping the Office ribbon is not a step forward. OO is always seems to follow MS Office and may never succeed. The solution is to jump ahead to the next big thing and skip this UI phase. [*]
... you're just enforcing the stereotype that open-source programmers cannot innovate and will always copy commercial software. I would love for Sun to hire some professional UI designers, maybe partner with folks like Aza Raskin, and come up with something modern and usable. [*]
But not everyone hated the ribbon clone -- in fact, some people were quite warm to it.
I like where this is going, myself. To be honest, the Office 07 Ribbon does look "functionally challenged" at first, but once you get used to it it is so much nicer to work with then a standard interface. After working on a project in Office 07 at my work, I find myself missing the Ribbon now every time I load up OOo. [*]
The default OOO interface, like the pre-ribbon Word interface, is cluttered and difficult to use. I do prefer the ribbon to it, but I'd like to see OOO come up with something even better. This line of thinking is good so far, keep it up. [*]
This is likely to make me adopt OOo. I love to love open source software, but sometimes commercial software is just more usable. This change of interface is going to remove OOo from my "I wish I could stand it" list. [*]
One other sentiment that emerged: people wanted to be able to pick either the "new" or "classic" interfaces, if at all possible.
... don't forget that there are people (including myself) who do not like this kind of toolbar and prefer the traditional ones. Make sure that there is an option to switch between ribbon and traditional toolbar. [*]
OpenOffice should become like the Firefox of Office suites. It should have a customizable UI. Unfortunately I don't know OOo codebase Firefox's UI is built with CSS and it's insanely customizable because of this. [*]
Some of the criticisms revolved around specific design choices, not the whole concept:
There is no singular menu system that universally covers all ergonomics. Combining sub actions [pseduo inspectors] attached to the sides or atop of the Context Editing View doesn't improve matters. It makes it the experience feel suppressive and gives one the sense of being smothered by distraction. [*]
My own feelings on this issue are mixed. For one, I'm not on the side of the ribbon-haters -- I run Word and Outlook (although none of the other Office 2007 apps), and find myself liking the ribbon quite a bit. When collapsed, it takes up no more space than the old menus did; the only thing I don't like about it is the lack of a contextual type-to-search option, which would remove the amount of hunting around needed. (From what I hear that's going to be a standard-issue item in Office 2010.)
But I'm not fond of the idea of OO.o picking up on the ribbon design and implementing it without thinking about how it fits into the program they've created. E.g.,: the comments about the use of vertical space on widescreen displays in the thread. It also doesn't look like they implemented the type-to-search function, which by itself would have been a step above the existing ribbon.
I'll still try out any edition of OpenOffice.org that comes along, just for the sake of staying on top of things, but I hope they take the time to look at least one step beyond the state of the art and make this not just competitive but preferable.
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