Microsoft has released a lot of beta software into the wild lately, and ever the glutton for punishment, I have downloaded most of it. The stuff I use on a regular basis (Office, Media Player, Internet Explorer) mostly confuses me. From these three pieces of software — arguably the three most used pieces of software, short of the OS itself — I get no clear picture of what future applications will look like.
Media Player 11 clearly has a Vista feel to it. It’s sleek, black, and has the Vista “breadcrumb” style navigation at the top of the window. There are large “section” buttons above that (what would have probably been tabs in a previous iteration) with “click for details” downward chevrons that produce menus. Menus are hidden behind all kinds of onscreen controls, actually.
Office 12, with its new “ribbon” bar is pretty snazzy, if a bit busy. There’s a LOT of stuff represented on that stripe of screen, but I haven’t gotten lost in it yet. I like it. That said, they seem to have rewritten the rules again, creating a giant active control box, with smaller icons next to it, as part of the title bar, making it difficult for us to emulate it as programmers. (DevComponents is helping us out with this, it seems.)
Finally, there’s IE7. I’m not sure what to make of the new interface. It doesn’t look like anything old or new, and doesn’t look like anything I’d like to emulate, frankly. It looks like some things (icons, location of menus, etc) changed just for the heck of it. I haven’t seen Vista in a while, so I need to take a look at it to see if it looks as out of place there as it does on XP.
