Blog / Random thoughts and musings.

User interfaces gone bad

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is finished. They’re pressing CDs now and will begin shipping in mid-January. I’ve been looking forward to this release for a while, mainly because everyone else in the universe uses Office, so if I want to (successfully) view their documents, and have them view mine, I need to use Office. I tried Apple’s new iWork suite, and it’s nice, but it had a lot of trouble with the Office documents I tried to open. The current Office suite for Mac is Office 2004, and only exists for PowerPC processors, so on all the new Intel-based Macs (like ours), it runs in slow PowerPC emulation mode. I did order Office 2008, mainly because of the too-good-to-refuse deal Microsoft ran the day after thanksgiving (buy Office 2004 now, get $100 off, and get a free upgrade to 2008 in January), which resulted in me getting Office 2008 for $25 plus shipping.

Anyway, the real point of this post is to share how sad I am at the Frankenstein user-interface of the new Office… a half-MacOS interface with a half-Vista interface glued on. This on the same day that I read an article about glow-in-the-dark cats being bred by inserting jellyfish genes into their DNA. I don’t think the cats or the software are better off. And what’s with that floppy-disk “save” icon?? Has anyone even seen a floppy disk in the last 8 years? What makes this more amusing is that the Office team did change the floppy disk icon as compared to the previous version of Office for Mac, and compared to the latest Windows Office: the new floppy icon is anatomically correct, whereas the previous versions had the aluminum access door on the wrong side as compared to a real disk. Well, all I can say is I’m glad they got that fixed!