FutureUI

Posted Aug 19, 2015 12:22 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much? by ccchips
Parent article: Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

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.