MS Office UI

Thanks to Adam and Ariya the topic is hot now so I couldn't resist commenting it :)

From what I can see, MS is trying to:

1. get rid of menus
2. get rid of modal dialogs.

I completely support those two goals. Heh, I should have shown those of you who were in Malaga "kdevelop4geeks.ui" file that has been lying on my desktop for more than a month ;) That file is the concept of KDevelop4 user interface I created before I heard about MS Office 12. First version of it didn't contain menus at all and second included a "Menu" button just where the "File" menu is in MSO12. Other concepts I was playing with were different though. Anyway, most of them were efforts to move most of functionality from dialogs to views inside the main window which coincide with the second effort of MS guys.

Thus said, I have to admit that we should probably not copy their interface, at least not in KDevelop. I've only looked at screenshots so I can be wrong here, but it seems their interface is designed for mouse users. Contrary to that, I'd like to see KDevelop interface completely navigatable by keyboard. More, I'd like to make keyboard navigation the prefferred way over mousing. Therefore it's more likely we have to invent a different UI.

Anyway, I'll try to gather my UI ideas and blog more about them soon.

Next:	KDE at OSDN.UA Conference
Previous:	Fried and Salted