Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:30 UTC (Tue) by Felix.Braun (guest, #3032)
In reply to: Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much? by louie
Parent article: Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

I agree that the ribbon interface is not as bad as it was made out to be, once you get used to it. I can get work done without the interface getting in my way. But that can be said of any interface that does not deliberately try to make things harder for their users. And yes, it feels cumbersome having to deal with different interfaces at home than what I am used to at the office. But is any of these interfaces objectively better? More discoverable? More intuitive?

I for one certainly don't feel that the ribbon interface is better. I know how to find the commands I regularly use. But the same is true of the "old" menu style interface copied by LibreOffice from Word2003. At the end of the day, I can get my work done in both. I still don't see the point of having been forced to learn the new interface. It's not really better for me, because I already knew how to use Word2003 efficiently. And judging by the documents I receive from less computer literate colleagues, they don't do significantly better in the new interface either.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:34 UTC (Tue) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link] (20 responses)

And judging by the documents I receive from less computer literate colleagues, they don't do significantly better in the new interface either.

But they are now used to it, having used it for years probably. Switching to LO will _feel_ old.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 9:33 UTC (Tue) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]

I had to use MS Word recently for work reasons, and for me it's exactly the opposite: the ribbons felt clumsy, couldn't wait to get back to LO.

Rehdon

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:32 UTC (Tue) by kreijack (guest, #43513) [Link] (10 responses)

> But they are now used to it, having used it for years probably. Switching to LO will
> _feel_ old.

[Disclaimer: I am against the ribbon bar]

In this review http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2418419,00.asp the author put in the comment:

Cons: Clunky interface.

but without justifying it. This suggested me that creating the "Ribbon bar" Microsoft made all other software to appear as "old"; I think that this was an expected (and wanted) result by Microsoft.

Regarding the Ribbon bar there are several things that I hate
1)not all the icon have a text; with the old menu interface, you can help by phone another colleague. With the ribbon this is more difficult because you can't name an icon . And if I am searching a function which vaguely remember, a text helps more than an image.
2) the ribbon have an "automate adjustment" behavior. So if you resize the window the icons are moved e/o resized. This make more difficult to find it sometime.
3) the ribbon bar interface is big, leaving less space to the other function!
4) the ribbon bar interface is located on the top instead on the left/right (the monitor is wide, so why still use the top/bottom area ?)

Apart that, I fatigue to see any gain in the ribbon interface.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 14:01 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (9 responses)

I love how we still use a 3.5" floppy image for saving. Try explaining that icon to someone learning who has never seen one. Or the drum image for storage once spinning rust is relegated to storage centers only. Not that many have seen platters directly, but I imagine folks can at least imagine that something is spinning based on the sounds they make.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 17:28 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

My friend's child said: "Oh, it's a plastic save icon!" when she saw a 3.5" floppy on my wall.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 17:34 UTC (Tue) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (5 responses)

I love how we still use a 3.5" floppy image for saving.

So when did you last actually use scissors for cutting text? And then used, uh, a clip board?!? for pasting it somewhere else? Uh what? I think the floppy disk should be the least of your worries.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:24 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Well, "scissors" and "cut" are at least related. Copy…eh, I still see clipboards around (and I feel like many saw them in schools growing up, but that is probably becoming less common now). Paste icons differ around, but glue is also related.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 10:05 UTC (Wed) by nelljerram (subscriber, #12005) [Link] (3 responses)

I wonder what children make of that strange icon we still use to represent a phone: a kind of crescent with a larger lump at either end. The modern icon for a phone should be just a rectangle.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 1:17 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a TV series or documentary (don't remember which) where they give kids (about 5-12 years old) old chunks of technology they've never seen before. One of the ones I watched they gave the children an old ATT era phone with a rotary dial. Not a single kid had any idea what it was. When told what it was most couldn't figure out how to dial it because there were no buttons and better than half asked where you turned it on.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 1:31 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I know of "Kids React". Here are the tech ones I found:

1st iPod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvlbRQq1UM
VHS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kesMOzzNBiQ
Typewriters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfxRfkZdiAQ
Game Boy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pCp8g-VjOs
Rotary phones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkuirEweZvM
Old computers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF7EpEnglgk
Cassette players: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk_vV-JRZ6E

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 1:20 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

If a rectangle does mean smartphone, it would imply "the do everything device", not telephone anyways.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 22, 2015 4:18 UTC (Sat) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

have you paid attention to the typical symbol for a 'phone'....
it usually depict a shape of phone from the 70's.... a decade before the 3.5 floppy.
and yet somehow even kids today, who may have seen one in a museum or an old movie, still have no problem selecting the right 'icon' on their cell-phone to make a call.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 22, 2015 4:37 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Umm, they outlasted 3.5" floppies by quite a few years (landlines still exist you know…kids probably still see them in schools too). Hell, desk phones at jobs are still handsets. They're far from as obsolete as floppies. We've already moved onto machines which don't even have CD drives.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 19:43 UTC (Tue) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (7 responses)

different... not necessarily old

old, in this case, is a pejorative to denigrate a choice other than yours

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:30 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (6 responses)

Oh, you'd better believe it!

The word "old" is a dear friend to merchants and marketers.

I remember once reading about a marketing campaign by SCO encouraging people to give up on those "old Linux systems..." and go with their proprietary operating system. What was the name of that OS? Can't remember---it's too old.....

Companies like Microsoft love to talk about "Old."

Bach is "old." Beethoven is "old." Shakespeare is "old."

So what will people use 300 years from now when they want to get work done....the Ribbon or the menu system?

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:40 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

The command line!

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 16:11 UTC (Thu) by deucalion (guest, #12904) [Link]

I suppose when I mention EDLIN, few will rejoice and even less will say "nah, I'm still using debug to input data directly into memory."

:o)

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:45 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Ribbon, no doubt.

FutureUI

Posted Aug 19, 2015 12:22 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

So what will people use 300 years from now when they want to get work done....the Ribbon or the menu system?

Direct brain interface. And that is assuming computers as we know them even exist at that time...

FutureUI is already here

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:16 UTC (Wed) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (1 responses)

Note that, already in 2015, "the menu system" as practiced by Office 2003/LibreOffice 2015 is mostly dead - phones, and a (much-needed) drive for simplicity in desktop software, have killed it in new software. Again, not to say that the Ribbon is The Solution, but clearly the giant wall of icons isn't the solution either. The sooner LO realizes that the better chance it has to get new adoption.

FutureUI is already here

Posted Aug 21, 2015 10:50 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

As noted already, the "Ribbon" is nothing truly new, and although I would agree that verbose menus are somewhat dated (remember the attempts to have "expanding" menus that just confused everyone?), there are plenty of places to look for other approaches.

When people bring up phones and tablets as the driving forces for change, I can't help wondering if I imagined my desktop computing experiences over twenty years ago when the average display had far fewer pixels than today's smartphones and where certain desktop environments made a lot more use of pop-up menus, not just as extra contextual menus but actually as their primary solution for menus. Maybe people regarding the removal of menubars and the adoption of alternatives as "novel" stuck to the Mac or Windows and, if they were even using the Internet many years ago, stuck to arguments about whether it was better to have a menubar at the top of the screen or inside every window.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:37 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (7 responses)

"But is any of these interfaces objectively better? More discoverable? More intuitive?"

Well, we can certainly objectively test discoverability, and I assume (since that was a stated goal of their design process) Microsoft's test data show exactly that. Again, it's worth reading the posts to understand what their goals were, and how they reached them. (Having watched people struggle on video with traditional toolbars, and having spoken to usability experts on the topic, I'd be shocked if MS's experiments show anything other than better discoverability.)

I'm not sure what "intuitive" means in this context, but if you mean "easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines in the '90s'", then, sure, the LO-style toolbar is more intuitive. That's a rapidly diminishing market, though.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 11:35 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (6 responses)

I'm not sure what "intuitive" means in this context, but if you mean "easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines in the '90s'", then, sure, the LO-style toolbar is more intuitive. That's a rapidly diminishing market, though.

Easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines before the ribbon, perhaps. I personally strongly dislike this "forget about your VIC-20, grandpa, we'll have ten people to replace you shortly" attitude that has become even more popular in the age of outsourcing and "swipe to know what to swipe" user interfaces.

And no, it's not about not liking new stuff. In fact, when I once made the regrettable choice of using Microsoft Word for something important (and regretted not using LaTeX of all things afterwards), the misery was compounded by the fact that I had already been using a more coherent and advanced document-processing solution for years (Impression Publisher, for anyone who may have heard of it) that had things like document stylesheets years before Microsoft's feeble implementation (that few people use anyway because it's easier to hit the different font effect buttons).

Sometimes the old stuff is actually better because it was properly thought-through (not referring to Word in any incarnation here, though) instead of being some furniture-rearranging exercise to achieve some kind of "fresh look" for a decaying property.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:31 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

> > I'm not sure what "intuitive" means in this context, but if you mean "easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines in the '90s'", then, sure, the LO-style toolbar is more intuitive. That's a rapidly diminishing market, though.

> Easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines before the ribbon, perhaps. I personally strongly dislike this "forget about your VIC-20, grandpa, we'll have ten people to replace you shortly" attitude that has become even more popular in the age of outsourcing and "swipe to know what to swipe" user interfaces.

And going back to that era, I had access to two word processors, one of which I loved (WordMARC Composer, otherwise known as Pr1meWord). When WordPerfect came on the scene, I rapidly dropped the other two *from* *choice*. And if you're talking about a UI, it didn't really have one - it gave you a "blank sheet of paper" and let you get on with it!

It also had this wonderful feature that *let you specify* where you wanted things on the page! So you could do things properly, lay out the document in your head or on scrap paper, then *get it right* in the word processor. I don't know whether Word has improved or not, but it always used to lay things out how *it* thought best, usually moving all your graphics on to the wrong page, and things like that! (Writer, unfortunately, feels too much like a Word clone to me, so I don't like that either). Sadly, all of Windows, Linux, and hardware has moved on and my ancient copies of WordPerfect no longer run. I can't afford to shell out for a new copy, and ever since Corel rewrote it as a Windows program (v9), it's been a lot naffer anyway. I need to try and get Dosbox, Win3.11, and WP6.1 working and then I'll be happy as larry again :-)

The trouble with so many programs is they are designed FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THEIR JOB. That's why WordPerfect was great - it was designed for *trained* *typists*, and they were very productive. That's why Word was such rubbish (and partly why it won out) - it was designed for people *who* *didn't* *know* *how* *to* *type* - so it appealed to managers who thought it was wonderful and foisted it on everyone else. And which is why the people who CAN type, HATE it.

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 15:32 UTC (Tue) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link]

WordPerfect's UI was the infamous template that fit above the F-keys and told you what Fx, Shift-Fx, Alt-Fx and Ctrl-Fx did. But it's still alive today, so not bad for a program that had its beginnings on Data General's AOS/VS.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 6:16 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (3 responses)

It's possible to get WP8 to run on modern Linux. I have it running on Slackware64-current. I don't use it; I just have it as a curiosity. But it does run.

It's not particularly easy to get working. You have to install a battery of ancient 32-bit glibc libraries and disable ASLR. But it's definitely possible, and, if you really love WordPerfect that much, it's probably worth the one-time futzing necessary to make it work.

And yes, WP6.1 in Win31 in DOSBox also works -- or maybe it was DOSEMU, can't say for sure. I've dealt with WordPerfect as the single biggest problem in a non-techie's switch to Linux, so I know all the various ways to get that piece of crap (sorry, still annoyed years later) running. The user rejected the native Linux version (too different from Windows version), modern WP running under WINE (occasional glitches), and WP6.1 in Win31 in some DOS emulator (too different from MODERN Windows version).

After years of WINE glitches, the ultimate solution was modern WP in not-modern Windows in VirtualBox. Not a single complaint since. You may find happiness with WinXP in VirtualBox running WP X9 or whatever they're up to now as well. Try everything, man; use what you love.

I personally stopped using word processors for anything after discovering LaTeX. But to each his own.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 21, 2015 9:23 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

:-)

WP fanatics probably should switch to Latex :-) I'll stop evangelising WP when you pry Reveal Codes from my cold dead hands (or you implement it, PROPERLY, in some other word processor!)

The problem is no other Word Processor I know has this window where you can edit AS TEXT, and see the gui changes appear. When I use WP, I work in Reveal Codes all the time (yet my wife hates it, and not surprisingly is quite happy in Word - because I can't see what (or more importantly, why) Word is doing what it does, I hate that).

And as I said, WordPerfect just lets me place anything I want, exactly where I want. If I want something *exactly* 1cm from the top and left margins, I can tell WP to put it there! It'll sort everything else around that, rather than sorting that around everything else! (As Word seems to do all the time :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 23, 2015 4:29 UTC (Sun) by gomadtroll (guest, #11239) [Link] (1 responses)

Whoopi, WP8 :-) My use of WP8 is a Virtualbox instance of NT4 and WP8 OfficePro, 96mb of memory (not bad for an OS + Office Suite), it is just another application running on my workstation, not bad for an OS + Office s.

AOO vs LO, I really don't get most discussions..mostly poltical, not real workflow comparisons.

I use AOO because of its better document fidelity with my archived data, something LO did not give the same priority. That was my decision, LO does lots of other things well, none that would compel me to use LO over AOO.

I have both installed, the shining new LO5 just in case someone is brain dead enough to send me a ooxml doc instead of "exporting/publish to/pdf..

greg

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 23, 2015 10:33 UTC (Sun) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

I don't this reply to sound like the typical "file bugs please" response that I'm sure you've seen before, but I do wonder if you had raised any of the backwards-compatibility issues you discovered with the LO developers. But I understand doing so can be really time consuming--particularly when your only reproduction case is in a document you might not want to send to the developers.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 15:38 UTC (Tue) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

Basically, the ribbon interface was not designed for you---and not for me either.

There are three kinds of users: clueless, power users, _really_ advanced users. Clueless users love the ribbon because they don't know the keyboard shortcuts and they used to get lost in the menu and toolbar maze; now they have a combined menu and toolbar interface, captions below toolbar button or button groups, and more commonly-used functionality available within roughly the same screen real estate.

You and I are power users: we know the most common keyboard shortcuts, we know what functionality is there and we can find it in the menus.

Really advanced users don't really write documents, they prepare templates for others to use. They know _all_ the keyboard shortcuts and invent more with macros, automate the hell out of their documents with fields and styles and macros; stuff that power users think they know but actually can only scratch the surface of. They don't care much about the ribbon because they don't use menus as much as power users do.

So, if we were to use MS Office, we'd be screwed. Now if only LO Impress didn't break multiple-object selection (4.4.5.2, no I didn't open a bug because I'm going to upgrade to Fedora 23 and 5.0.0 next week anyway)...