September 2007 Archives
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OpenID promises to do what Microsoft's Passport attempted years ago: a single logon to multiple sites, with permissions and personal data managed by the user. But will it succeed where Passport failed? I love the idea, but I tend to think not. The problem
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A fantastic post on O'Reilly's Inside Aperture blog about using Amazon's S3 service to store portions of your Aperture library. This is something I am going to have to take a closer look at.
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I suspect most people will find this home to be too sparse and monochromatic for their tastes, but I find it beautiful. The interior courtyard with its door perfectly framing the horizontal lines of the landscape is incredibly compelling. I also love how
Okay, admittedly, it is $2.4 million, but I still welcome that the designers of the awkwardly-named XSMG XSR48 Superboat made a deliberate departure from the teak-and-brass of traditional nautical design. Too many personal boats today channel the spirit of builders of Spanish galleons. The bright, simple and monochromatic pallete for the cabin of the XSR48 is particularly captivating.
(Click for more photos).
Hi. My name is Jeffrey Smith.
By day, I am a Group Manager in the Microsoft Business Division, heading up a product group working on mobile solutions. By night, I sleep.
But in between and on weekends...and holidays...and sometimes by day at work, but only if someone isn't watching me...I spend my time designing and remodeling my house, goofing around with my kids, trying out the latest technology, cooking and entertaining with friends, reading, indulging my meager photography skills and watching Formula One races.
I blog here as regularly as I can, and welcome any and all comments. If you want to reach me, try any one of the following methods.
| jeff at mynameistaken dot com | |
| skype | jeff.a.smith |
| jeffreysmith | |
| profile | |
| profile |
Cheers.
Back in the early 'aughts', I was a member of the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft (a.k.a. the "MacBU," pronounced "mac-boo"). In my nearly three years there, I lead the Product Planning efforts for Mac Office 2004, the version currently on the market. As you can imagine, I'm very excited to see the MacBU's progress on the next release highlighted in today's post on the BU's Mac Mojo blog.
The new Elements Gallery looks to be an excellent adaptation of principles from the Office 2007 Ribbon user interface, but with a unique Mac twist. The real-time previews are there, together with a tabbed interface that makes browsing through available options more discoverable. But there's also no mistaking this as anything other than a Mac OS X application.
Now, I like the Gallery, but I'm guessing that the embedded toolbar is actually going to be the most striking change Mac Office users will notice. Whereas previous versions of Mac Office applications displayed a single set of toolbars that was shared across all of the open document windows, the MacBU is now following the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for Mac OS X and providing a separate toolbar inside of each document window.
Interestingly, this is something we considered doing for Office 2004 as long ago as 2001.
Fig. 1: PowerPoint 2004's Floating Toolbar
The arguments for and against the use of embedded toolbars are pretty straightforward. A single set of toolbars has the advantage of taking up a set amount of screen real estate, regardless of how many documents the user has open (see Fig. 1). This is especially important when screen resolution is low and every pixel is precious.
In addition, the consistent placement of the toolbars on the screen allows users to develop "muscle memory" for toolbar button location, regardless of where the document window is placed. It's not quite a perfect application of Fitt's Law (à la Mac OS X's screen corners for Expose), but the concept is similar. By comparison, with a toolbar in each window, button targets move depending on the window coordinates and its dimensions. There is additional cognition needed to find and then hit these moving buttons.
Simply put, this slows things down and mouse-driven tasks can take longer to complete. We're talking about a few seconds -- or even fractions of a second -- here, but the effect in the end is that people get frustrated from having to constantly look for the application controls and may break their train of thought (an important consideration when your application is used for the creation of content).
Fig. 2: PowerPoint 2008's Embedded Toolbar
During the planning phases for Office 2004 back in 2001-2, we debated this issue for some time. On top of the design argument outlined above, we had development costs to contend with, as well. Time invested in changing the UI would take away from other feature work we might want to do. We had to be sure that the payoff would justify cutting other features to fit it into the schedule. To help us figure this out, we built mock-ups of Office using an embedded toolbar even back then, just to see what it might look like.
In the end, the argument for floating toolbars won out and Office 2004 continued with the toolbar architecture customers had seen in Office for over a decade. The critical factor then was screen real estate.
Remember, this was a time when Apple's newest iBooks shipped with screens capable of only 800 x 600, a 17" Studio Display was $1,000 and most Macs capable of running OS X were sporting resolutions of 1024 x 768 or less. Deduct 100 - 200 vertical pixels for the menu bar, window borders and Mac OS X's plump, new dock and it's clear to see that an embedded toolbar could squeeze the available document workspace to a thin, narrow slit. Hardly ideal conditions for document authoring and editing.
Fast-forward to 2007. New MacBooks ship with a native resolution of 1280 x 800, a 33% increase in the vertical dimension. Most new iMacs ship with twice the number of pixels of those early G3 iBooks and external flat-panels with 1200 vertical pixels and 20" of viewing space cost less than $400. Hardware advances clearly have made embedded toolbars more viable.
But something else changed over the past six years, too: Mac applications. Mac OS X apps in 2001 were all over the map in their look and feel. Many were simply ports of Mac OS 8/9 apps with their user interfaces rebuilt using Aqua controls. Very few had yet adopted Apple's Mac OS X HIG and even fewer new-from-the-ground-up apps were in the market. Worse yet, the HIG was evolving like any new technology, with developers and designers still figuring out the best bits to use as well as the ones to ignore (drawers, anyone?).
The Mac OS X application landscape today is much more stable than it was in those early days. The clunkiness of ported Classic apps has given way to a wide variety of elegant and beautiful products. Apple's own UI tools and APIs have improved, as well, allowing an even larger percentage of developers to create functional products that look and work well, too.
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| Red Sweater Software's MarsEdit blog editor | HandBrake DVD Ripping App | MetaQuark's AppFresh software updater |
Better tools and shared learning across the Mac developer community for what works and what doesn't has driven greater consistency in application design over the past six years, too. Products as varied in their function as MarsEdit, HandBrake and AppFresh all sport similar and now-familiar UI elements. Whereas an Office 2004 with embedded toolbars would have been among the first applications at the time incorporating that design, Office 2008 without them would be equally out of place.
I was among those in the MacBU who hoped we could adopt embedded toolbars for Office 2004. But it was clear in those early years of Mac OS X that it was simply too soon to change the way the product millions of people used everyday looked and worked.
Not only has the hardware, the platform and the Mac applications ecosystem evolved to make this more viable now, it's clear from Nadyne's post that the MacBU has put the time to good use. They appear to have been able to take a much more holistic approach to the entire issue, blending the goodness of the Office 2007 Ribbon with Apple's HIG and some of MacBU's own user interface innovation. They've done more than simply duct tape the current toolbars to the top border of the doc windows.
The proof will be in the actual use of Office, and I'll hold my final judgement until I get a chance to play with it myself. But I like the design direction the 2008 version is taking and now, it finally seems right for this extensive update.
Finally. Ironically, this will probably stop me from ever subscribing to the printed version of the Times. That still leaves me open to buy a one-off copy of the Sunday paper, though, and enjoy its hefty newsiness with a latte and a warm scone.
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Getting data into your activity management system is the biggest challenge. There are some good ideas here. I have been using Jott now for a few weeks and find it to be pretty good. I'd prefer a voice recorder on my phone, but alas, I have an iPhone.
Yesterday, I bought a pickup truck. I'd promised myself I'd never be "one of those people," so clearly I've hit an important personal milestone. What that is, I'm still not sure. To make matters worse, I ate a burger and fries from McDonald's in the truck on the way home. I'm a case of Schlitz and a gun rack away from moving to Texas.
What better or more auspicious time, then, to (re)start my blogging.
my name is taken is, like any new blog, an exercise in talking to myself. Over time, it is my sincere hope that others will find what I write here interesting, entertaining and maybe even useful. Time will tell.
My goals for MNiT are simple: to meet some new people and share my thoughts on subjects I care about. I will cover topics that are of interest to me, on the conceit that there are others that find these subjects interesting, too. I will write about technology, architecture, design, cars, photography, cooking and travel. Aspects of my life that are likely to show up here include my job at Microsoft, the design and remodel of my house, my love/hate of Formula One and my constantly-changing collection of sports cars. And pickup trucks, I guess.
Here we go.
