I got no problem with that tiny LED or glowing apple logo personally

But liquid glass and insane amount of bugs that arrived with it is killing me.

I recently had to get printing working for a family member on an Apple tablet. I'm not an Apple jockey so it took me a while to sort out and I've being using computers since 1980 and consulting since 1995.

You tap an icon that looks like the outline of a rectangle with an arrow pointing up. Then you tap the name of the printer. Then you tap another rectangle with an up arrow and then tap the word "Print".

I may have got the precise steps wrong but it really is that abstruse to print something on a tablet. Never mind that mDNS/Bonjour has done its thing - the steps to actually indicate that you want to print is frankly weird.

What on earth is that box with an up arrow actually supposed to mean? Why does the interface switch from icons to text?

> I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon.

Well, yes, but that observation doesn't prove the point you think it does.

People who were highly experienced with previous non-ribbon versions of Office, disliked the ribbon, because the ribbon is essentially a "tutorial mode" for Office.

The ribbon reduces cognitive load on people unfamiliar with Office, by boiling down the use of Office apps to a set of primary user-stories (these becoming the app's ribbon's tabs), and then preferentially exposing the most-commonly-desired features one might want to engage with during each of these user stories, as bigger, friendlier, more self-describing buttons and dropdowns under each of these user-story tabs.

The Ribbon works great as a discovery mechanism for functionality. If an app's toplevel menu is like the index in a reference book, then an app Ribbon is like a set of Getting Started guides.

But a Ribbon does nothing to accelerate the usage of an app for people who've already come to grips with the app, and so already knew where things were in the app's top-level menu, maybe having memorized how to activate those menu items with keyboard accelerators, etc. These people don't need Getting Started guides being shoved in their face! To these people, a Ribbon is just a second index to some random subset of the features they use, that takes longer to navigate than the primary index they're already familiar with; and which, unlike the primary index, isn't organized into categories in a way that's common/systematic among other apps for the OS (and so doesn't respond to expected top-level-menu keyboard accelerators, etc, etc.)

I think apps like Photoshop have since figured out what people really want here: a UI layout ("workspace") selector, offering different UI layouts for new users ("Basic" layout) vs. experienced users ("Full" layout); and even different UI layouts for users with different high-level use-cases such that they have a known set of applicable user-stories. A Ribbon is perfect for the "Basic" layout; but in a "Full" layout, it can probably go away.

The thing that bothers me more than ribbon itself is how much the performance started degrading once they introduced it.

I got MS Office 97 working in Wine recently, and it's still shockingly capable. There are lots of formatting options, it can read my system TTF fonts, and it's since it's nearly thirty-year-old software, it runs ridiculously fast on modern computers.

I don't feel like MS has added many more features to Office that I actually care about, but I feel like the software has gotten progressively slower.

I think the ribbon is terrible. When you are looking for something, you can't just look in one direction but you have to scan up and down. Then it may be text or just an image. And the thing you are looking for may be on some other ribbon page.

I much prefer menus with toolbars that have only the most used functions.

Ribbon has some good elements to it, but other elements are questionable at best. Sizing of buttons for example feels completely arbitrary and not connected to frequency of use or anything else obvious.

I think the best parts of it could be replicated by just combining tabs and traditional toolbars, but that’s not complex enough of a concept to need a dedicated moniker.

It’s also stupid in terms of screen real estate.

Earlier Word/CorelDraw/etc had a thin toolbar with lots of functionality. Barely occupied any space at just 800x600 resolution.

Nowadays, the ribbon and all other junk occupy a huge portion of the screen, even at 1920x1080.

It’s amazing how little screen area today actually shows the useful part of a document.

Instead of the Ribbon, a thin context sensitive toolbar would have been more useful.

The Ribbon is a disaster. Compared to conventional toolbars, it fails across several metrics.

When it first came out, I did studies of myself using it vs. the older toolbared versions of Word and Excel, and found I was quantifiably slower. This was after spending enough time to familiarize myself with it and get over any learning curve.

EFFICIENCY

The biggest problem is it introduced more clicks to get things done - in some cases twice as many or more. Having to "tab" to the correct ribbon pane introduces an extra click for every task that used to be one click away, unless the button happens to be on the same tab. Unfortunately the grouping wasn't as well thought out as it could have been. It was designed with a strong bias for "discoverability" over efficiency, and I found with many repetitive tasks that I commonly carried out, I was constantly having to switch back and forth between tabs. That doesn't even get into the extra clicks required for fancier elements like dropdowns, etc. And certain panes they couldn't figure out where to put are clearly "bolted" on.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

At the same time, Microsoft de-emphasized keyboard accelerators. So where the old toolbar used to hint you the keyboard shortcut in a tooltip every time you rested your mouse over a button, the new one doesn't - making it unlikely users will ever learn the powerful key combos that enable more rapid interaction and reduce RSI caused by mousing (repetitive strain injury). In my case this manifests as physical pain, so I'm very aware of wasteful gestures.

SCREEN REAL ESTATE

The amount of text in the button captions on the ribbon is also excessive. It really isn't a toolbar at all, more of a fancy dropdown menu that's been pivoted horizontally instead of vertical. It turned the menu bar, which used to be a nice, compact, single line, into something that now takes up ~4x as much vertical screen real estate. As most users' monitors are in landscape orientation, vertical space is scare to start with; congratulations you just wasted more of those precious pixels, robbing me of space to look at what I really care about which is the document or whatever thing I'm actually working on.

DISCOVERABILITY

You used to be able to get a good sense of most software's major functionality by strolling through all the menu options. Mastery (or at least proficiency) was straightforward. With the more dynamic paradigm Microsoft adopted along with the Ribbon, there's lots of functionality you don't even see until you're in a new situation (or that's hidden to the responsive window layout, which is ironic - instead of making the thing more compact, they made portions of it disappear if your window is too small). I grant some may argue this has benefits for not appearing as overwhelming to new users (although personally I've always found clean, uniform, well thought out menus to be less jarring than the scattered and more artistically inclined ribbon). But easing the learning curve had the trade off of making those users perceptually stuck in "beginner" mode. They can't customize the ribbon as meaningfully (I used to always tailor the toolbar by removing all the icons I already knew the keyboard shortcuts for, adding some buttons that were missing like Strikethrough, and move it to the same row as the menu bar to maximize clientarea space)

In my case, after trying out the new versions for a year, I made an intentional decision to go back to the 2003 versions of Word and Excel, and never look back (forward?). They are my daily drivers. These days, I barely touch modern versions of Word and Excel, except for the very rare instance I actually need a specific new feature (i.e. a spreadsheet with more than 65k rows). If someone asks me to use the new version, I simply refuse (which has never been a showstopper - my work quality is preeminent, and once you get past policy bureaucracy it turns out clients/employers don't care what tool I use to get it done).

The whole point of a toolbar was always to be a place you could pin commands you want instant access to, just a click away. The ribbon shredded that paradigm, and in my opinion took us a marked step backward in computing. It fails across several metrics, compared to regular toolbars. I wanted to blog about it at the time in hopes of convincing the world it was a mistake, but didn't have the free time. 20 years later, I'm curious if more people share these sentiments and acknowledge its shortcomings.

OS X inherited its multitasking model from NeXTSTEP, which predates Win95 by several years.

You have to use windows 95 with a computer from 1995 to realise how painfully slow it was compared to windows 3.

Windows 95 was a vast improvement in looks over 3.x. Of course tastes differ, but I found it very aesthetic, not ugly at all, and used the classic look until Windows 7 EOLd.

I think there was a period from Windows 3.1 to somewhere during Windows 98 (maybe right up until the release of Office 97?) where both first-party and third-party Windows apps were all expected to be built entirely in terms of the single built-in library of Win32 common controls; and where Windows was expected to supply common controls to suit every need.

This was mostly because we were just starting to see computers supporting large bitmapped screen resolutions at this point; but VRAM was still tiny during this period, and so drawing to off-screen buffers, and then compositing those buffers together, wasn't really a thing computers could afford to do while running at these high resolutions.

Windows GDI + COMCTL32, incl. their control drawing routines, their damage tracking for partial redraw, etc., were collectively optimized by some real x86-assembly wizards to do the absolute minimum amount of computation and blitting possible to overdraw just what had changed each frame, right onto the screen buffer.

On the other hand, what Windows didn't yet support in this era was DirectDraw — i.e. the ability of an app to reserve a part of the screen buffer to draw on itself (or to "run fullscreen" where Windows itself releases its screen-buffer entirely.) Windows apps were windowed apps; and the only way to draw into those windows was to tell Windows GDI to draw for you.

This gave developers of this era three options, if they wanted to create a graphical app or game that did something "fancy":

1. Make it a DOS app. You could do whatever you wanted, but it'd be higher-friction for Windows users (they'd have to essentially exit Windows to run your program), and you'd have to do all that UI-drawing assembly-wizardry yourself.

2. Create your own library of controls, that ultimately draw using GDI, the same way that the Windows common controls do. Or license some other vendor's library of controls. Where that vendor, out of a desire for their controls to be as widely-applicable as possible, probably designed them to blend in with the Windows common controls.

3. Give up and just use the Windows common controls. But be creative about it.

#3 is where games like Minesweeper and Chip's Challenge came from — they're both essentially just Windows built-in grid controls, where each cell contains a Windows built-in button control, where those buttons can be clicked to interact with the game, and where those buttons' image labels are then collectively updated (with icons from the program's own icon resources, I believe?) to display the new game state.

For better or worse, this period was thus when Microsoft was a tastemaker in UI design. Before this period, early Windows just looked like any other early graphical OS; and after this period, computers had become powerful enough to support redrawing arbitrary windowed UI at 60Hz through APIs like DirectDraw. It was only in this short time where compute and memory bottlenecks, plus a hard encapsulation boundary around the ability of apps to draw to the screen, forced basically every Windows app/game to "look like" a Windows app/game.

And so, necessarily, this is the period where all the best examples of what we remember as "Windows-paradigm UI design" come from.

I once proved to my boss that a font was crashing System 7. And we always unplugged the network when we didn’t need it because a crash on one Mac could bring down every other Mac on the network.

That’s an odd way to spell Motif.