StarDestroyer.Net BBS

There's a blog about Microsoft's new Office UI, which seems to be a rethink of the whole UI. They're claiming extensive usability testing and also responding to feedback with the open betas of it. Does SDN have any thoughts on it?

I actully like the new UI, if they have quick preformance I might switch back from Openoffice.

It looks like they're really trying to get the UI right. At any rate, any attempt to get beyond "cram as many mysterious glyphs on the toolbar as possible" is a step in the right direction.

On the other hand, I doubt Word is going stop being bloatware that does 90,000 things poorly at the expense of the 10 things I want it to do well. But from what I saw, at least it will do those 90,000 things poorly with a good UI.

I actually like the new Office UI. They finally realized that the "40 rows of 10,000 16x16 icons" idea was getting old really fast. And getting rid of the menu bar is actually a good thing for Office, whose menus were notoriously massive and complex. It might not be a UI which is suitable for all applications, but it works for Office.

EDIT: Also, this UI could not work on the Mac version of Office for a variety of reasons, the absence of the menubar for one. So hopefully this will mean that the Mac Office people will focus more on being innovative in the UI department rather than trying to duplicate the Windows Office's idiocy.

Hrm. If you have IE6, you can remote into Microsoft via Citrix to play with it.