Linux world stepping up their UX?


  • :belt_onion:

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    It's legit bug.

    Another program interfering with yours is generally considered firmly in the "not a bug" category...


  • Banned

    @sloosecannon depending on target security level. Another program interfering with your SSH session is definitely a bug if it's not supposed to.


  • Dupa

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @kt_ said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @kt_ said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @blek said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    even though I personally wouldn't use these because any graphical UI is seriously affected by the way its designers think, and the way they think isn't necessarily the way I do

    Right; unlike those great CLI tools like Git which are universally accessible.

    Plus, @blek, stop thrashing ribbon. It’s what got us out of the UX dark ages into the modern world.

    Seriously, ribbon is a real feat of interface design. It’s much more accessible and can adapt to the current context. It is a big step up from the old “hidden in hundreds of menus” paradigm.

    Did they finally solve the issue of tools randomly changing places while using them? If not, I'm gonna keep trashing them until they fix it.

    1. Never experienced this.
    2. You would thrash a whole design paradigm because of one bad implementation?

    At the time, it was one out of one.

    So what? Paradigm /= implementation.


  • Banned

    @kt_ dynamically moving around buttons was part of that paradigm.


  • Dupa

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @kt_ dynamically moving around buttons was part of that paradigm.

    It still is. If you change context, the buttons change. Which is the greatest thing in the world. Instead of hundreds of menus and dozens greyed-out buttons, you get only that what you might need. Beautiful thing.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @kt_ dynamically moving aroundappearing/disappearing buttons was part of that paradigm.

    FTFY. Unless you consider the following "moving around" too:

    0_1509832791004_7fec90ca-ea2f-462a-9116-095810c54497-image.png 0_1509832833268_8a733d42-e0c4-4523-a18c-da533ce0b296-image.png


  • Banned

    @kt_ said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    It still is. If you change context, the buttons change.

    No, not like that. I mean behavioral analysis to provide each user with their own personalized toolbars with only the tools you need the most, all without asking the user what they think about it.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @kt_ said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    It still is. If you change context, the buttons change.

    No, not like that. I mean behavioral analysis to provide each user with their own personalized toolbars with only the tools you need the most, all without asking the user what they think about it.

    I mean, that research was apparently what resulted in the Ribbon in the first place, so 🤷


  • Fake News

    @jbert said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    For the record, here's a graphic showing the concept of dead space in a multi-monitor setup, thought it might help in this discussion:

    0_1509807507945_Desktop layout.png

    I'll have to check if my setup at home still has such problems. My right screen (out of two) has a lower resolution, so there might be some dead space at the bottom.

    My Arch box with Xfce keeps the cursor out of the dead space like it should, windows will simply snap to the border and you can't drag any icon anywhere near the border (it does the "drag and drop not possible here" action). Consider it fixed.

    Now if only my GTK and Qt themes would match...


  • Banned

    @tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @kt_ said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    It still is. If you change context, the buttons change.

    No, not like that. I mean behavioral analysis to provide each user with their own personalized toolbars with only the tools you need the most, all without asking the user what they think about it.

    I mean, that research was apparently what resulted in the Ribbon in the first place, so 🤷

    No, not like that. I mean behavioral analysis in real time, by the application itself, while you're using it, and adapting based on results.



  • @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    so I don't know how previous Windowses did it, but in 10, this "OS being in charge" DPI scaling is godawful.

    Gee, I wonder if Blakeyrat posted admitting exactly that in this very thread...


  • area_pol

    @marczellm said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Discuss. Have you used these distros? Were they any good?

    I have used Linux Mint (Cinnamon) as my main OS since around 6 years ago and was satisfied. I share the opinion that in Mint things just work.
    Around a year ago i switched to KDE and I like it even more:

    • Pretty and customizable UI, with a wide choice of widgets for the taskbar and desktor
    • Core programs like file manager, program launcher, drop down console are very convenient
    • The KDE programs are well integrated, sharing the chosen UI style and a unified key-binding editor for global and local shortcuts
    • Linux in general is well suited for scientific programming which is my field
    • I have no problems with multiple screens or printers
    • KDE uses Qt which is my favourite UI library

    I am happy with the UI and prefer to avoid CLI when possible.

    Is 2017 The Year Of Linux On The Desktop?

    In the past I would maybe try to encourage people to try something I enjoy, but having seen enough of these debates on this forum, I would not attempt that anymore.

    As for the market share, I think big factors are marketing, deals with hardware producers and OEMs.
    In the end, the UI is all OSes is similar from a high level point of view, especially for everyday use cases.



  • @adynathos said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Linux in general is well suited for scientific programming which is my field

    Is it.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @kt_ said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    It still is. If you change context, the buttons change.

    No, not like that. I mean behavioral analysis to provide each user with their own personalized toolbars with only the tools you need the most, all without asking the user what they think about it.

    I mean, that research was apparently what resulted in the Ribbon in the first place, so 🤷

    No, not like that. I mean behavioral analysis in real time, by the application itself, while you're using it, and adapting based on results.

    Oh no, that would be terrible!

    Picture this:

    MSWord: Huh, you haven't pressed the Underline button in five hours of actve usage! I'll hide that away for you, click this tiny button here to expand the "Hidden buttons menu" if you want it again.
    User: WTF Where did my Underline button go! I need it and Micro$oft got rid of it!
    MSWord: As designed, you're not using it, we don't expect you to use it, and since you're not using it now why should we show it to you?

    Maybe if implemented in a manner like the "Unused Desktop Icons" utility (and you know how well that went), it might not be so obnoxious.



  • @tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Oh no, that would be terrible!

    Gmail does that right now with mail labels. Fucking shit UI.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Oh no, that would be terrible!

    Gmail does that right now with mail labels. Fucking shit UI.

    Oh yeah, forgot about that, since I instinctively click the "More " thing whenever I refresh the gmail page.


  • area_pol

    @blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Linux in general is well suited for scientific programming which is my field

    Is it.

    It is for me.
    My position is "Linux is good for this", not "everything else is necessarily bad"
    I do computer vision / machine learning, if I was to find a difference, it would be that deep learning frameworks like Tensorflow or Pytorch usually get Linux releases first and Windows ports later.
    But fortunately most of the software is cross-platform.

    We do most of work on clusters, which also run Linux, so the environment is familiar.


  • Banned

    @blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    so I don't know how previous Windowses did it, but in 10, this "OS being in charge" DPI scaling is godawful.

    Gee, I wonder if Blakeyrat posted admitting exactly that in this very thread...

    Iunno. All I know is that you implied having it left up to applications to implement is a bad idea.



  • @e4tmyl33t Until you finally figure out that you have to click/focus on a table to get the "table tools" ribbon.

    Where are always people who expects everything is available in front of them.


  • Considered Harmful

    @blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @marczellm I should have said non rectangular. You know, L shaped. Windows and macOS have no problems with those, X11 has to pretend they're a rectangle and have tons of invisible pixels windows and icons can get lost in. Again: unless that's been fixed really recently. I don't use Linux on a daily basis.

    It's been "fixed" for almost 20 years now. Of course you could still select a window manager that doesn't support Xinerama but that's up to you.


  • Considered Harmful

    @atazhaia said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    I got a complete office suite included for free with my Linux dist. Which pretty much all mainstream dists include by default. Also, I got plenty games that run natively on Linux. Both indie and AAA. The only thing missing is Adobe.

    True. So yeah, people who absolutely need Adobe for their DTP or video work can't use Linux. The only thing Joe Random User regularly uses that's Adobe is Adobe Reader, and that's precisely the bit that's completely superfluous and that everybody would be better off without as it's almost as full of critical bugs as Flash.

    Although I wonder if there's any truth to what my friend is saying, who is claiming that Adobe is looking at porting the entire CC to Linux due to Windows shitting itself when it has too many CPU cores to work with.

    I can imagine. But considering how long it took them to get a 64-bit version of Photoshop out of the door I'd also suspect they have some serious portability issues.


  • Considered Harmful

    @blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Oh no, that would be terrible!

    Gmail does that right now with mail labels. Fucking shit UI.

    Have you tried Google Inbox?


  • Considered Harmful

    @cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @e4tmyl33t Until you finally figure out that you have to click/focus on a table to get the "table tools" ribbon.

    Where are always people who expects everything is available in front of them.

    Everything in Table Tools, when used, applies to the currently selected table. If you are not selecting a table, all the buttons would otherwise just be grayed out. Given that they could continue to add more and more context-sensitive sections, what would be the point of showing you a big list of things you have to scroll through instead of only showing you groups of things relevant to what you're doing?


  • kills Dumbledore

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    behavioral analysis in real time, by the application itself, while you're using it, and adapting based on results.

    Isn't that what office 2003 tried and it was not only unpopular but also measurably worse for usability?


  • :belt_onion:

    @pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Oh no, that would be terrible!

    Gmail does that right now with mail labels. Fucking shit UI.

    Have you tried Google Inbox?

    I believe he has, and it's enough of a change that I'm quite sure he didn't like it...



  • @tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    No, I was commenting on the fact that that's literally all it took to bypass the "Trial expired" dialog.

    Like, basically the same as drawing a lock on a piece of paper and wrapping it around the gate handle.

    Except that the skills needed to bypass the two aren’t comparable at all.

    Edit: :hanzo:d, I noticed after posting.



  • @pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    what would be the point of showing you a big list of things you have to scroll through instead of only showing you groups of things relevant to what you're doing?

    Discoverability comes to mind. Graying out items rather than hiding them means you can tell they’re there even when you can’t use them right now, so you might remember them when you do need them. Whereas if items are hidden, you obviously won’t notice them and so perhaps won’t look for them in the place where they appear once you can use them.

    This is more an issue with menus and other things whose container disappears when you’re not actively using it than with toolbars, though.


  • 🚽 Regular


  • Considered Harmful

    @sloosecannon said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Oh no, that would be terrible!

    Gmail does that right now with mail labels. Fucking shit UI.

    Have you tried Google Inbox?

    I believe he has, and it's enough of a change that I'm quite sure he didn't like it...

    If he has, I haven't heard about it. I certainly heard him pontificating about how if he installed the Android app, it'd completely fuck up what website interface he had when using a browser, despite there being literally zero reason to think that it's true or even to have come up with such a concept in the first place. But no, nothing about actually trying it.


  • Considered Harmful

    @gurth said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    what would be the point of showing you a big list of things you have to scroll through instead of only showing you groups of things relevant to what you're doing?

    Discoverability comes to mind. Graying out items rather than hiding them means you can tell they’re there even when you can’t use them right now, so you might remember them when you do need them. Whereas if items are hidden, you obviously won’t notice them and so perhaps won’t look for them in the place where they appear once you can use them.

    This is more an issue with menus and other things whose container disappears when you’re not actively using it than with toolbars, though.

    Right, since I'm not actually looking at literally any table-related operations when, you guessed it, I'm not using tables. There is fundamentally no difference between an always-present menu labeled Tables and a menu which only appears when you select a table named Table Tools, except for the fact that other more important things could be taking up that space when you don't have a table selected. Obviously, things you can't do at that very moment but that are still pertinent, such as removing a row from a one-row table, should remain grayed out and not just disappear. But top-level categorization? It's like Chrome having 'view source' on a direct JPEG file (producing HTML that it pulled out of its ass!). It just doesn't make sense.



  • @pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Have you tried Google Inbox?

    you mean the one that does even more machine learning to do even more things automagically without the user understanding?


  • Considered Harmful

    @marczellm said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Have you tried Google Inbox?

    you mean the one that does even more machine learning to do even more things automagically without the user understanding?

    It does this to provide more functionality, not to hide it from you. (I assume you're referring to things like View Issue buttons for GitHub notifications and the like.)



  • @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @alexmedia said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    In the Office 2007 ribbon, controls were always in the same place.

    @blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Did they finally solve the issue of tools randomly changing places while using them?

    You mean the thing that's never happened ever? Yeah it's fixed. Also it never existed.

    I distinctly remember one time when I was using Word 2007 where I wanted to use some feature A and then some feature B. So there was a button for A, and a button for B. So I did A, then wanted to use B, but it wasn't there anymore. It was replaced by another button for something else. It took me quite some googling to figure out where it was moved.

    You're probably going to say it's impossible and it never happened to anyone ever and I'm lying, but I remember this being a very common complaint among Office 2007 users at the time.

    Wow, that's a wonderfully concrete example and we know exactly what this is about!

    Seriously, you just repeated: "Something moved around". We know now nothing more than at the beginning of this post.

    I think you need to look up what "distinct" means.



  • @rhywden What @Gąska is referring to is the feature/mis-feature of 'adaptive menus' (or in the case of toolbars such as the Office ribbon, adaptive toolsets), in which the menu or toolbar gets rearranged automatically to present the most frequently used menu items towards the top and infrequently used ones are moved to the bottom, shifted to a sub-menu, or just outright hidden.

    While it is a very useful feature for casual users who need to hunt out the menu/toolbar items every time they need to use them, and scores very high in some kinds of UX testing (especially focus groups, where the users don't get much time to play with a given feature and are often relatively inexperienced users to begin with), they proved very frustrating to users who are accessing the menus very frequently because the positioning no longer matches their habits and muscle memory.

    This is a well-known problem with adaptive UI systems - the use of adaptive menus and toolbars in Office 20072000, and thank you @blakeyrat for the correction, Mi R Da Dummazz is one of the go-to case studies of the pitfalls in the use of focus groups for UX testing - and I suspect that most of you are just doing Blakeyrat-style feigned ignorance to give Gąska a hard time. Seriously, how could you not get what he was talking about? I'm calling shenanigans.

    That having been said, I am guessing that Gąska either didn't know or couldn't remember the English language name for the 'feature', hence the descriptions rather than simply referring tot he problem by name. Following the Office 2000 menu and ribbon fiasco - and similar, but more rapidly fixed, problems with the Apple Dock - Office and most other apps which implement adaptive UIs allow you to disable the adaptive feature, but since he didn't know what it was called, he didn't know where to look for the option.



  • @jaloopa said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Isn't that what office 2003 tried

    Office 2000, and yes. Also Windows 2000, believe it or not.

    Google being hip and trendy and all that shit would obviously never hire any employee old enough to remember Windows 2000. So they just repeat all the same mistakes.



  • @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden What @Gąska is referring to is the feature/mis-feature of 'adaptive menus' (or in the case of toolbars such as the Office ribbon, adaptive toolsets), in which the menu or toolbar gets rearranged automatically to present the most frequently used menu items towards the top and infrequently used ones are moved to the bottom, shifted to a sub-menu, or just outright hidden.

    I am not aware that the Office Ribbon does this.


  • Banned

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    That having been said, I am guessing that Gąska either didn't know or couldn't remember the English language name for the 'feature', hence the descriptions rather than simply referring tot he problem by name.

    No. I literally can't remember the features I'm talking about because it happened once, and it was over 8 years ago.



  • @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden What @Gąska is referring to is the feature/mis-feature of 'adaptive menus' (or in the case of toolbars such as the Office ribbon, adaptive toolsets), in which the menu or toolbar gets rearranged automatically to present the most frequently used menu items towards the top and infrequently used ones are moved to the bottom, shifted to a sub-menu, or just outright hidden.

    I am not aware that Office does this.

    By default, it doesn't, not anymore. You can still turn it back on, I think, but no one ever does.



  • @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden What @Gąska is referring to is the feature/mis-feature of 'adaptive menus' (or in the case of toolbars such as the Office ribbon, adaptive toolsets), in which the menu or toolbar gets rearranged automatically to present the most frequently used menu items towards the top and infrequently used ones are moved to the bottom, shifted to a sub-menu, or just outright hidden.

    I am not aware that Office does this.

    It doesn't by default, not anymore. You can still turn it back on, I think, but no one ever does.

    See my edit. I'm not aware that the Ribbon ever did this.


  • area_pol

    Regarding adaptive menus, I love the following feature of Blender: press SPACE and start typing to search through the list of actions I can take with the current selection.

    I wish every program had this kind of searchable list of actions.

    There are many actions available and searching through a bunch of icons or nested menus would take much longer.
    Of course you don't have to search by name every time - actions can be bound to hotkeys as usual.



  • @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    I'm not aware that the Ribbon ever did this.

    It didn't, people are full of shit, making shit up to make Microsoft look bad.



  • @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden What @Gąska is referring to is the feature/mis-feature of 'adaptive menus' (or in the case of toolbars such as the Office ribbon, adaptive toolsets), in which the menu or toolbar gets rearranged automatically to present the most frequently used menu items towards the top and infrequently used ones are moved to the bottom, shifted to a sub-menu, or just outright hidden.

    I am not aware that Office does this.

    It doesn't by default, not anymore. You can still turn it back on, I think, but no one ever does.

    See my edit. I'm not aware that the Ribbon ever did this.

    Sorry, I don't know how old you are, or how often you'd used Office 2000, Windows 2000, or Windows ME, so I guess maybe you just missed it. It was a bit of a noise at the time, because Microsoft neglected to mention this brave new improvement to people - or rather, they mentioned it in the advertising, but no one knew what 'adaptive menus' meant so they were caught off guard when their menus started adapting and suddenly nothing was where they expected them to be.

    Microsoft quickly added a feature to disable it (or, I'm guessing, started telling people how to find the disable option), and in later versions had it disabled by default - which, given that it is a feature that is only of use to people who aren't regular users and won't know how to turn it on, renders the whole thing pointless.



  • @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden What @Gąska is referring to is the feature/mis-feature of 'adaptive menus' (or in the case of toolbars such as the Office ribbon, adaptive toolsets), in which the menu or toolbar gets rearranged automatically to present the most frequently used menu items towards the top and infrequently used ones are moved to the bottom, shifted to a sub-menu, or just outright hidden.

    I am not aware that Office does this.

    It doesn't by default, not anymore. You can still turn it back on, I think, but no one ever does.

    See my edit. I'm not aware that the Ribbon ever did this.

    Sorry, I don't know how old you are, so I guess maybe you just missed it. It was a bit of a noise at the time, because Microsoft neglected to mention this brave new improvement to people - or rather, they mentioned it in the advertising, but no one knew what 'adaptive menus' meant so they were caught off guard when their menus started adapting and suddenly nothing was where they expected them to be.

    Microsoft quickly added a feature to disable it (or, I'm guessing, started telling people how to find the disable option), and in later versions had it disabled by default - which, given that it is a feature that is only of use to people who aren't regular users and won't know how to turn it on, renders the whole thing pointless.

    So, let me recap: It was a feature that was quickly disabled, @Gąska stumbled once over it eight years ago.

    Not to mention that the feature didn't have anything to do with the ribbon itself because that feature was also active in Office 2000 and 2003 (that I actually remember).

    That's like saying: "I don't like manual gears because I once forgot to loosen the handbrake."



  • @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden What @Gąska is referring to is the feature/mis-feature of 'adaptive menus' (or in the case of toolbars such as the Office ribbon, adaptive toolsets), in which the menu or toolbar gets rearranged automatically to present the most frequently used menu items towards the top and infrequently used ones are moved to the bottom, shifted to a sub-menu, or just outright hidden.

    I am not aware that Office does this.

    It doesn't by default, not anymore. You can still turn it back on, I think, but no one ever does.

    See my edit. I'm not aware that the Ribbon ever did this.

    Sorry, I don't know how old you are, so I guess maybe you just missed it. It was a bit of a noise at the time, because Microsoft neglected to mention this brave new improvement to people - or rather, they mentioned it in the advertising, but no one knew what 'adaptive menus' meant so they were caught off guard when their menus started adapting and suddenly nothing was where they expected them to be.

    Microsoft quickly added a feature to disable it (or, I'm guessing, started telling people how to find the disable option), and in later versions had it disabled by default - which, given that it is a feature that is only of use to people who aren't regular users and won't know how to turn it on, renders the whole thing pointless.

    So, let me recap: It was a feature that was quickly disabled, @Gąska stumbled once over it eight years ago.

    Not to mention that the feature didn't have anything to do with the ribbon itself because that feature was also active in Office 2000 and 2003 (that I actually remember).

    I am guessing the @Gąska is think of the toolbar, rather than the ribbon. Most places I have used Word have the ribbon disabled (I think?) and use the older style menus, so I was making the same mistake.

    Or did they repeat this mistake with the ribbon? I dunno, I almost never use Office even when using Windows (word processing and spreadsheets being anomalously low on my list of work activities). Either way, I know others have repeated the mistake as well (such as with the Apple Dock and similar global toolbars such as the ones in Ubuntu Unity and Gnome 3, though with those it is less of a disaster given the smaller set of tool selections), but I am not sure about the Ribbon.



  • @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    @rhywden What @Gąska is referring to is the feature/mis-feature of 'adaptive menus' (or in the case of toolbars such as the Office ribbon, adaptive toolsets), in which the menu or toolbar gets rearranged automatically to present the most frequently used menu items towards the top and infrequently used ones are moved to the bottom, shifted to a sub-menu, or just outright hidden.

    I am not aware that Office does this.

    It doesn't by default, not anymore. You can still turn it back on, I think, but no one ever does.

    See my edit. I'm not aware that the Ribbon ever did this.

    Sorry, I don't know how old you are, so I guess maybe you just missed it. It was a bit of a noise at the time, because Microsoft neglected to mention this brave new improvement to people - or rather, they mentioned it in the advertising, but no one knew what 'adaptive menus' meant so they were caught off guard when their menus started adapting and suddenly nothing was where they expected them to be.

    Microsoft quickly added a feature to disable it (or, I'm guessing, started telling people how to find the disable option), and in later versions had it disabled by default - which, given that it is a feature that is only of use to people who aren't regular users and won't know how to turn it on, renders the whole thing pointless.

    So, let me recap: It was a feature that was quickly disabled, @Gąska stumbled once over it eight years ago.

    Not to mention that the feature didn't have anything to do with the ribbon itself because that feature was also active in Office 2000 and 2003 (that I actually remember).

    I am guessing the @Gąska is think of the toolbar, rather than the ribbon. Most places I have used Word have the ribbon disabled (I think?) and use the older style menus, so I was making the same mistake.

    Or did they repeat this mistake with the ribbon? I dunno, I almost never use Office even when using Windows (word processing and spreadsheets being anomalously low on my list of work activities). Either way, I know others have repeated the mistake as well (such as with the Apple Dock and similar global toolbars such as the ones in Ubuntu Unity and Gnome 3, though with those it is less of a disaster given the smaller set of tool selections), but I am not sure about the Ribbon.

    No, as I said: I'm teaching how to use Office and never once has anything moved around in the last several years.



  • Eh people, Office 2007 support just ended. It's still installed on my laptop. I could put an end to myths if they were refutable (which they aren't).



  • Sorry, I missed the 'teaching' part. I expect that @Gąska is misremembering Office 2000, then.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @scholrlea except he was specifically talking about the ribbon



  • @scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Most places I have used Word have the ribbon disabled (I think?) and use the older style menus, so I was making the same mistake.

    The ribbon doesn't co-exist with the Office 2003 menus. There is no version of Office that has both.

    People in this thread just have no fucking clue what they're talking about.



  • @marczellm said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:

    Eh people, Office 2007 support just ended. It's still installed on my laptop. I could put an end to myths if they were refutable (which they aren't).

    Please do. I would be curious to see this myself. Could you provide screenshots, and explain the circumstances of them? I would be especially interested in the options menu, and whether there is a switch for adaptivity and what the default setting for it is if there is one.

    Not because I really care about Office, but UX is a pretty fascinating topic in general, and I am interested in the evolution of UI designs, and the lessons from past mistakes.


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