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submitted 3 months ago by dch82@lemmy.zip to c/technology@lemmy.world

Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?

E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365

Office 2003

It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.

Microsoft 365

Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.

Why did this happen?

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[-] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get "the new ribbon UI!"

The answer was never, incidentally.

[-] Boozilla@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

Wow, I still use paint.net. My needs are pretty humble, and it still hits that sweet spot between MS Paint and Gimp.

[-] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I still use it too, almost weekly.

[-] ClanOfTheOcho@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

I've sort of been forced over to Mac (not that it's a bad thing, just a thing), and Paint.NET is perhaps my biggest loss in that transition. I've loved that program since its early days, and is always one of my first installs on any new Windows installation.

[-] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I've been trying to make a switch over to Linux for a lot of reasons, but honestly Paint.NET is the one thing that keeps me tethered to Windows that I'm not super grumpy about (Adobe also keeps me tethered to Windows, but that makes me angry every time I think about it).

If *Nix has a decent image editor with layers that isn't super over-engineered like GIMP is, I haven't heard of it yet. Maybe that's all become web-based.

[-] interurbain1er@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

I kinda remember those conversations, wasn't there an issue back then that Microsoft had a patent on the ribbon ?

[-] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I don't think so. He just said that he had evaluated it and it wasn't a good fit for the application. I remembered it was in our Popular Feature Requests thread, and I looked back and (crazy enough) it's still there.

this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
262 points (83.4% liked)

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