Dev-Picayune

Jeff Atwood insists that Office 12 is going to represent the “death of the main menu”. I sat down and then watched the entire 41 minute Robert Scoble video interview with an Office Product Director. I will agree that the new “ribbon” seriously improves accessibility to functions in Office and it looks like something that would be very useful. But I am not so sure that this represents the “death of the main menu”. Others will certainly copy the ribbon design and I think there is where we’ll see further innovation is in new thinking about menus. To really illustrate what the ribbon does, it’s essentially just using the horizontal space more efficiently. You replace both the first layer of the main menu and the toolbar with a tab that shows all the stuff that would be on the toolbar plus the main menu at the same time.

If you wanted to quickly emulate the ribbon you could do just that: do away with the main menu. Create a tabbed area at the top of the screen that is vertically large enough to hold all options and tools when spread out over the entire tab area. MS kept the File menu (to some extent) but you could theoretically drop that too in favor of tabs. So all this really is at its core, is the use of tabbed area at the top of the screen instead of toolbars and menus. For lightweight programs, I fail to see how this will catch on.

But I am still encouraged that this could open the door for people to be creative once again. And I definitely have no knock against tabs. I have always been a huge fan of tabs. They represent an easy to understand (physical world tie-in) mechanism for optionally showing and hiding a ton of stuff. Komodo, SciTe, Visual Studio, and tons of other editors of various sorts have gone to using tabs to allow quick selection of various files in an MDI environment. And of course there is tabbed browsing. I guess my question is for programs like browsers or things like that, what would happen if they switched to a ribbon? Would it be too confusing with two rows of tabs fairly close to each other? I guess that’s where you have to change the look of the menu tab (ribbon) enough to distinguish it from the regular document tabs.

I do think we can thank OpenOffice. Why? Because OpenOffice has put pressure on Microsoft to innovate. Microsoft is needing to differentiate their product once again as the leading office suite in the world. Their new menus and the auto switching of those menus to context sensitive things (very nicely done) and the auto-preview of changes as you hover over things (also neat but slow looking) are attempts to set themselves apart. People need a good reason to upgrade and a good reason to pay money for a product that OpenOffice is offering a version of for free. This is a great example of open source working for everyone (even those who don’t use it). This innovation was not accomplished because of government intervention or anti-trust laws. This is being achieved through hard work and research by a company that wants desperately to continue to win a market.