Symphonious

I've long been a proponent of UI designers making decisions about what the best way to do something is instead of just providing configuration options to the user - after all, if you are a fully trained and experienced UI designer, shouldn't you know better than your completely untrained users? Seeing some of the discussion going around about Joel's criticism of the Windows shutdown menu, including Arno Gourdol's comments on the Mac OS X shutdown options and they both seem to being taking it a little bit too far.

Joel:

Restart can be eliminated. 95% of the time you need this it's because of an installation which prompted you to restart, anyway. For the other cases, you can just turn the power off and then turn it on again. Another option goes away. Less choice, less pain.

Arno:

I argued against including Restart, Shut Down and Sleep in the Apple menu. How often do you restart your computer, really, especially as a regular end user? On the very rare time when you need to do so, why not just Shut Down, then power up again?

Here's a really good reason - that button you have to press to turn the computer back on again? It's under the desk dammit! I don't want to bend down and press it manually even if I only have to do it rarely. Even if it's not under the desk1, I want to be able to tell my computer to restart and walk away, knowing that it will be ready when I come back.

Similarly, if I'm leaving my computer I want to be 100% confident that it's not going to stay on and chew up a bunch of power, so I want to see it go to sleep before I walk away. That way, if a poorly behaving program refuses to let the computer sleep I won't come back to find my computer still fully powered on after my two week vacation. You could argue that the sleep button shouldn't be displayed for laptops where closing the lid puts the laptop to sleep and I'd agree with that, but it is required for desktop machines.

UI designers can't just follow simple rules like "fewer options == better", they have to actually understand the user's mindset and what the user wants to achieve then provide the most intuitive, most efficient way for them to achieve that. Making the user bend down to press the power button leaves a bitter taste in their mouth even if they do it rarely, not letting them satisfy their paranoia about whether or not the computer will go to sleep just makes them wait around in front of their computer for 5 minutes watching it or worry about it after they've walked away.

Oh and for the record, iPods do have a way to turn them off, it's just not obvious2 but it is mentioned in the manual and I know a number of people who religiously turn off their iPods whenever they stop using it despite my protests that it will take care of itself. iPods also have a restart function, actually quite a severe forced restart function, it's just not obvious. This kind of model may actually work for OS X - put the sleep and restart functions only in the Apple menu, not in the confirm shutdown popup, but I don't see the advantage to that since the popup is simple enough to quickly understand anyway.

1 - a lot of Apple machines can be powered on by pressing a key on the keyboard, though I don't think newer Macs include this functionality↩

2 - in fact it's so non-obvious that I keep forgetting what it is, something like holding down the button in the middle of the scroll wheel↩

Robert Scoble:

I’d love to know what you think? Does any of the Office 2.0 vendors have a chance to edge in on Microsoft’s market?

Edge in - sure, it's been happening for at least the past 5 years or more. I've lost count of the number of times we've sold EditLive! to companies who were replacing Word to make life more pleasant for users. Notably though, these aren't situations in Word's core target market - creating documents destined for print. Word has picked up a lot of market share in all kinds of weird and wonderful content creation scenarios that it wasn't designed for and it's picked up features to make it work quite well there. Despite that, these fringe areas are ripe for competitors to specialize in and provide solutions that fit better with the user's intentions.

Interestingly, Word is usually the first choice when implementing or developing a new solution because people want a front end that users are already familiar with. The trouble is, they are using Word in a new situation so they often wind up frustrated. Usually it's with things outside of Words control like checking documents in and out of the content management system or custom integrations with the back end systems and repositories. In the end though, users start demanding a better editor that fits with what they're trying to do better. That's when alternatives get a look in.

The other major, and often underrated, advantage that many alternatives to Word have is ease of deployment. Java really shines in this area - I've spoken to a number of very large clients that report massive failure rates for getting even the simplest stand alone application deployed, but can roll out our applet seamlessly without problems. The ability to deploy stand alone apps via WebStart is a huge win for a lot of enterprises too - users just click a link on a web page and the application starts. DHTML solutions that run cross-browser seamlessly also benefit from this, though a lot require browser upgrades or changes which causes major headaches.

Interestingly, Office itself doesn't tend to suffer from a deployment problem because it's already deployed everywhere - it's the add-ons, plugins and other integrations that enhance Word to work with the back end repositories that are too difficult to deploy and cause problems. It's no use having Word pre-installed if you can't also deploy the plugins that your system needs.

What you are unlikely to see is organizations moving to not installing Office at all and instead using Web 2.0 technologies. You might see them go to OpenOffice or similar alternatives though it's not going to be a big trend, but you just can't beat the productivity of a stand alone app for random desktop publishing tasks. As soon as content management systems come into play though, browser based solutions have been chewing into Office's market for a long time.

I've just moved my blog and email hosting over to an unmanaged VPS running Debian so I no longer have to fight an extremely outdated RedHat and an awful Plesk control panel to get stuff done. It comes as quite a surprise that I'm finding the software in the Debian stable APT archives refreshingly up to date. Still no PHP4, but I have apache 2 and Python 2.4 (as opposed to Python 2.2 previously) so I'm happy.

If you see any problems, please let me know.

So Microsoft has decided to specify licensing terms for anyone who wants to develop an Office 2007 style UI. I can't help but think that this is somewhat hypocritical considering Microsoft was the beneficiary of a rather important case against Apple regarding copying of user interface ideas. I also find it odd that Microsoft is using licensing techniques to enforce the way the ribbon and similar ideas work instead of just making the actual component implementations available to everyone thus guaranteeing that they always work the same way (including in future updates).

I also found the comment below interesting:

You can use the UI in open source projects as long as the license terms are consistent with our license.

Given that you have to ensure that the UI guidelines are met, I'd be surprised if this were compatible with the GPL and it certainly goes very much against open source ideals and discourages innovation and improvements.

Even worse though is the limitation:

There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license.

Given that Word itself copies quite a few ideas from other earlier word processors (including the very idea of a word processor) it bothers me a fair bit that they'd add this limitation, especially considering they have a monopoly on Office anyway - they don't really need to add more barriers to entry.

Lately it seems like Microsoft is really ramping up its legal team as a new source of competitive advantage and income. I can't see how that could end well for the IT industry or for technology users.

While a couple of people got ahead of things and announced the engineering release of EditLive! 6.0 - the marketing team completed deployment of the web site updates today and so EditLive! 6.0 final is officially available to everyone.

Now we just need to get better at updating the official Ephox Weblog instead of just our own blogs…