Office 2k/XP

[nfotxn]

Who the fuck at Microsoft thought hiding options from users would somehow speed workflow? Easily disabled.. but how did that actually make it into a product that costs so much to buy (and presumably develop)?

Additionally, why does Office XP not actually use widgets/"controls" that work with the XP "Luna" skinning system?

Comments

[danlmarmot.livejournal.com]

1. Silly usability people. Believe it or not, most people do more with customized menus. I don't like them either.

2. Easy, OfficeXP isn't skinnable because they roll many of their own controls. They always have; the Office and NT teams (the WinXP organization is still referred to as the NT team at Microsoft... or often the 'ball breaking NT team') don't really talk to each other a whole lot.

[beardoc.livejournal.com]

What I'd love to see is a really functioning menu. Not one that takes stuff away, but one that adds. Like if you commonly use a menu option that is 3 menus deep, then if you keep on using it Office will bring it to the main menu.

That's more functional and reduces mouseclicks/movements more than what they currently do.

[ranger1.livejournal.com]

I can only approve of Apple "do it and I'll fuckin' spank you" attitude towards developers who put superfluous homemade UI widgets into Mac OS X applications.

Coders love to reinvent the wheel. Especially if they can make it an object-oriented wheel.

[danlmarmot.livejournal.com]

Heh heh. One of the first guys I interviewed at Microsoft was a developer who had just left Taligent--remember them, Apple's attempt to make an object-oriented operating system? Or was Taligent a development framework? Or a runtime environment?

Anyway, we did hire him, and he rewrote Mac Internet Explorer's preferences engine, which is very tricky as it interfaced with the old crusty Internet Config program. Internet Config at that time wasn't part of the MacOS, either.

Well, to make a long story longer he made *everything* an object... right down to colors, which in and of themselves were object triplets of red objects, green objects, and blue objects. It was absolutely insane, and when I ran a profile of Mac IE for memory and size footprint, I found the Prefs library he wrote sucked up 800KB of disk space, and when loaded consumed about the same amount of memory. All to read and write preferences.

Sigh. I am no fan of object oriented weenies.