Office UI

So, I've been looking over the new AppleInsider series about Microsoft Office 2008, and I have a couple of things to say:

1. First, Office 2004 seemed more Mac-Like. Too many unnecessary gradients and the whole "glass" theme is too much like Vista and not enough like Mac OS X. I do realize that Office is written in Carbon, but I sense the distinct touch of the Vista UI designers here, with the glossiness. Also, who's bright idea was it to make the gallery bar transparent? It matches the Leopard menu bar, but the menu bar makes sense, mainly because it is not in the center of a window. Also, it now takes up more space than the old toolbars used to. Moral of this bullet: the Mac OS does not take its cues from the Windows UI.
2. Some of the things are just clunky. For example, the themes in PowerPoint seem like a developer threw together a gradient and some rectangles, and the fact that the toolbars copy the windows toolbar is deeply disapointing. And while I'm on the subject of toolbars, who puts Open and Save items in their toolbars? Menus are there for a reason, you can't make them go away like you did in Vista.

All in all, if you need all of the features (which 95% of us do not), get OpenOffice or Office, otherwise iWork works better, and is cheaper. Since the OpenOffice.org developers intend to work on the Mac UI after they get it ported to Cocoa, we should see some progress on that front, interface wise. Hopefully they do not make the same mistakes Microsoft did.

Why I love Wine and Ubuntu

Wine was originally for the linux platform, and it shows. When using Wine on Ubuntu to run various games, I stumbled across a very interesting piece of functionality. After you install Wine, a wine submenu appears in your applications menu. The "Programs" submenu of the Wine menu functions like the Windows "All Programs" menu. Click on an application and it launches. Cool.

However, I did run into one small snag. I pressed "Restore to Defaults on the Ubuntu menu editor, and my wine folders' names were changed to wine-foldername. I tried editing it back with the menu editor, but the Ubuntu menu editor will not call up the proper dialog to edit a folder's name. I fixed this by installing kmenuedit and editing the menus with that.

Leopard and HUD panels

With Leopard's release, apple decided to integrate those black transparent panels as a feature within Interface Builder. This means that it will be much easier to do "cool looking" black panels without the work involved before: a custom subclass of NSPanel, rewriting the background view, making the title bar work again, etc.. However, one thing that I fear is that too many people will use them and we will get a Vista-like windowing problem of not being able to tell what window is on top. I think that the main thing UI designers should recognize is that Apple uses these panels sparingly. By just thinking about where I saw them I can think of two places: the quick look panel and the image adjuster panel. Nowhere else. Without the proper restraint we will have applications use them when not aesthetically wise, such as with a normal inspector-like panel. These kinds of panels are good for when you want something to stand out and you do not have very many controls on it. Like most things, when used sparingly and tastefully it works well, when overused it utterly fails.