Tonight the local CHI meeting, I listened to a presentation by Jensen Harris, a key designer behind the new Microsoft Office user interface. He presented a history of Word and Office and how it evolved into Office 2003, and then went into a live demo of the new office apps sporting the ribbon interface and contextual interaction. Mr. Harris acknowledged they (MS) are taking a risk in changing the UI/interaction of the apps. And it was great to hear someone so close to the project speak in detail about how it's supposed to work and why they chose to do what they're doing.
A couple of things jumped out at me while watching the presentation: 1) the Runtime guys were on a similar track with their somewhat-context-sensitive inspector thing (but there are way too many sub-level choices to be made in the palette) 2) the fact that Rev developers can create rich menus by using stacks would seem to bode well for a future of making apps that run alongside the Office experience (regardless of how valid you think MS's UI direction is) In the last few minutes of his talk, Mr. Harris demoed a UI treatment that I personally find very interesting and appealing: a floating contextual palette of sorts. Initially it comes up ghosted (translucent), positioned out of the way from the item you are editing; the palette gets more opaque as you mouse toward it, and becomes more transparent as you mouse away from it. Pretty cool stuff. There were a lot of good points made, and one that was quite refreshing to hear: "Remove to simplify." I wrote down a bunch of points that seemed like they might worth posting, but Mr. Harris also has a blog where you can read his personal comments about development of the project: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh Regards, Scott Rossi Creative Director Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design ----- E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] W: http://www.tactilemedia.com _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
