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MS Office 12's Incredible New UI

Friday, 23 September 2005  |  manyoso

Ariya sent an email to the KOffice list today passing along this link to an interview with the program lead for MS Office 12's new UI. All I can say is WOW. This is stunning stuff. A colossal change and, IMO, a great one. They have taken an incredibly complex app and eliminated all of the menu's without eliminating the functionality. They've also made it so that none of the functionality is hidden.

Here's a screenshot:

New Office 12 UI Screenshot

Now, I haven't actually played with it, so it might come off worse in practice (perhaps the hit to screen realestate is just too much for laptop users for instance), but I have to applaud their courage.

We have to show similar courage for KDE4. No, not to eliminate our functionality, hide it or rock our users, but to develop something compelling :)

Can you imagine if we could take apps like Konqueror, KDevelop, KWord (insert-favorite-complex-KDE-app-here) and eliminate the menus while still delivering and presenting all of the functionality... the mind boggles.