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I oh so hope they would "Ribbon" IE8..... I absolutely can not stand the mess that is the interface to IE7.  Put the home button near the address bar Microsoft!.

Paul, what do you think about not putting an option to make text justified in wordpad? is it because no one would buy office (that's my theory)? why is it like this?

thanks :)

The Office division will probably not like this ...

OT - Sorry.

But Paul locked the other thread. (This was OT there too.)

From the original NY Times article, this doesn't look like something that was planned in the last couple of days.

www.nytimes.com/.../18adco.html

OT

Shark,

Exactly. It's moving on to the next phase right on schedule as planned.

The amount of press material at Microsoft's press pass shows this is well coordinated.

I'd also add that moving on to the first real phase of the campaign works well today as today is Microsoft's annual Company Meeting. I'm sure the next phase ads will be shown there.

@Shark  sigh another label with that liberal comment.  I suppose now if I came back at you would freak out again and want an apology?  No worries I wont push you button again.

ONTOPIC Word Pad looks nice if it can read and write the new docx format then alot of people would not need Word.

"Put the home button near the address bar Microsoft!"

Honestly, these comments annoy me.  Who really uses a Home button anymore in a browser???

Also OT:

After having an HTC Touch Diamond for almost a month now and discovering the amazing amount of functionality provided out of the box, the best app I've found on the device ISN'T Opera Mobile, which is nice and all, but I just don't get what people see in these mobile browsers offering desktop functionality and having to pan and zoom all over the place to get to the respective content.  No, the best program is called "RSS Hub" ("NewsBreak" on the developer's website), and it's made by Ilium software.  It supports text RSS (including images) with a simplified Channel -> Headline -> Article navigation structure, and supports both audio and video podcasts.

I have Paul's sites, some TWiT podcasts, TG Daily, Engadget & Gizmodo (for a laugh), and some video podcasts from the CBC (including the awesome show "The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos").  You can even create custom groups for feeds.  It's simple, intuitive, and automatically downloads and updates feeds (including the respective audio and video for podcasts) in the background.  

For mobile devices, the web isn't the best way to access internet content - it's RSS.

www.iliumsoft.com/.../newsbreak.php

Pingback from  Windows 7 will continue with “that ribbon thing”

>>Apple executives have been “using a lot of their money to de-position our brand and tell people what we stand for,” said David Webster, general manager for brand marketing at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash.

“They’ve made a caricature out of the PC,” he added, which was unacceptable because “you always want to own your own story.”

The campaign illustrates “a strong desire” among Microsoft managers “to take back that narrative,” Mr. Webster said, and “have a conversation about the real PC.”<<

Thats all good and well, but its pretty late in the game.  They sat around and allowed Apple to generate a lot of buzz and momentum they would otherwise not have had.

That said, this looks very effective:  www.microsoft.com/.../imageGallery.aspx

OT

"The amount of press material at Microsoft's press pass shows this is well coordinated."

Also all the celebrities that they've signed up. The likes of Ina Freid may pat themselves on the back for having derailed the old campaign, but it does look like this has been planned for a while. Of course, facts are not something that many of these tech reporters and gossip sites like Engadget and Gizmodo really care about. Someone said the other day, "the plural of anecdotal is not data." Well, for many of these reporters, that does seem to be the case.

bettieblu, firstly, that was a joke. Secondly, when did having liberal friends become an insult? BTW, I'm a liberal.

I like the ribbon.  I really do.  I loved it when Autodesk licensed the interface for AutoCAD.  I love it in office, and I can't wait to use it pervasively throughout Windows.  But I have a hard time in this case seeing the point of adhering to it so religiously that you HAVE to have the row that gives it the "tab" look and labels said tab "Home".  There's no other tabs!  Maybe it's like Word, where other tabs appear when something is selected, I don't know.  But I hope the team implementing the ribbon keeps their brains turned on and stays flexible...allow the 'system' to change when the application would benefit, as long as it's not done confusingly.

Just my $.02

@waethorn

I use the browser's home button.  Like @meason, I think the home button's placement in IE7 is extremely odd.

"Like @meason, I think the home button's placement in IE7 is extremely odd."

I'm sure that market data is going to be the determining factor here.  I don't use it, and I've asked numerous people about it, and they honestly say basically this:  "No, not besides getting my daily mail/news/searchpage when I first load up the browser.  I don't actually click the button to get my home page".  I can say with a good level of certainty that that is the norm.

If you're really that determined to get it moved, maybe you should turn on the CEIP in IE7 and offer feedback rather than just chewing about it.  After all, it worked for Office 2007 - the UI was created with a big help from the CEIP usage data in Office 2003.  The CEIP is the "Neilson ratings of software feature usage".  That said, if the majority rules in favour of not using it regularly, you won't get your way.

Re: the IE Home button: or, they could just let people customize the toolbar, like in every other browser.

"they could just let people customize the toolbar, like in every other browser."

There have been skinning programs for IE ever since IE3.

This is another case where Microsoft lets partner developers add some of the functionality rather than including it themselves.  People complain that it's not included, and yet when they add that kind of functionality, the same people complain that it's "bloated".

According to the article that the image links to, docx is not supported yet, so I guess the ribbon-bound wordpad is stuck with .rtf for now?

deepfry, there's nothing major wrong with RTF.

I often reccomend that people email document attatchments as an RTF, rather than an office document, because it can be construed as condescending to assume that the receiving party has office installed.

Now that is fresh and clean. Just by looking at it, I could transition to that with no issues. The ribbon is gold and I hope this consistency runs through the rest of Windows Seven.