What were they thinking? (MS Office 2007)

[Dave Land]

On Apr 24, 2008, at 8:21 AM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote:

> At 10:05 AM Thursday 4/24/2008, Nick Arnett wrote:

>> The whole point of using drop-down menus in a GUI is to be table to
>> slide the cursor across them and immediately see what's available.
>> Somebody in Redmond apparently thought they were improving on that.

Somebody at AddInTools.com evidently agrees with you that this was
no real improvement, and has a product to restore classic menus:

http://www.addintools.com/english/menuoffice/

Microsoft: creating a vibrant software ecosystem by ruining existing
products.

>> Vi is easier than this.
>
> ;)

If only because nobody makes money from vi, it hasn't been fscked-
around with over the years. If you learned to use vi on a VT-52
hooked up to a PDP-11, as I did, then today's Mac OS X copy of Vim
("VI iMproved") is as familiar as you'd want it to be.

>> This brings to mind an elderly friend who yesterday was talking ...

Cool UI thing on Mac OS X "Leopard" and the Mail application: hovering
over the word "yesterday" reveals that it has been recognized as a
time-related word, which can be clicked to pull down a menu allowing
me to: "Create New iCal Event" or "Show This Date in iCal".

>> I suppose one of the worst offenders is the pharmaceutical industry,
>> where the newer allergy and heartburn drugs are no better than the
>> old ones, just tested less... and far more expensive.

Such as the supposed difference between Celexa and Lexapro: Lexapro
came out just as third parties began marketing generic citalopram.
Actual theraputic benefits of the new version may not be meaningful.

Dave