stevenf.com - Office 2010 preview:
Seriously, go look at this thing. There’s some sort of “mini toolbar” in the title bar of the window in addition to the standard window controls. (Before my fellow Mac users get too sanctimonious, let’s consider Safari 4 beta’s “top tabs”, which my internal jury is still out on.)
Then you’ve got the ribbon itself, which appears to be tabbed, and one of the tabs has what I can only guess is a resize widget. I mean what is happening here?
The first section of the ribbon is “Delete” which has, as far as I can tell, three separate icons for delete. Do you have to use a specific delete button for a certain type of data? Why? What is this about? The delete icons are also two different sizes, and one has a popup menu hanging off of it.
The ribbon has an “Actions” section containing a “More Actions” popup.
The Find section is, unlike all the other sections, unlabeled. It appears to contain a toggle button with a popup arrow underneath it.
I also like the Zoom section which contains a single icon, also labeled Zoom.
This is impenetrable. It’s UI salad. I realize this is not (yet) shipping software, but my god. If you sat me down in front of this, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea where to begin.
6:39 PM