| This isn't 1990 anymore - if the kind of UI design that the devs have gone for (have settled on?) alienates a tech-friendly user such as myself, there isn't a hope in hell of people like my parents using it regularly. I bet Microsoft Office and LibreOffice look virtually identical to most lay-people. They probably will look more alike to you than you remember, if you take the time to look honestly. Neither Office's ribbon or the LibreOffice toolbar is really so different from the toolbars of the 1980s. This is much ado about not much. If these matters of fashion are really so important in terms of distinguishing one piece of software from another, where does that leave the software development crowd? Did we really want to be fashion designers? Is this the way to change the world with software? Through fashionable icons and good font choices? There's a tremendous amount of talk in this thread about how LibreOffice looks and how Microsoft Office looks, but precious little about how well they work. What does that say about us? [Edit: consider the history of the Office GUI: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/history-evolution-microsoft-of... There's been an absolute rat's nest of buttons and other controls at the top of the document for 26 years. The graphic design of the 2013 version is currently more fashionable than the graphic design of the 1990 version, but the 1990 version indisputably has less stuff on it. When someone calls the older fashion "cluttered" I think they've merely learned to habitually overlook the greater clutter of the newer interface.] |