Ribbon
When you start the Microsoft Paint program in Windows 7, what is the first thing you notice? What has changed since Windows Vista (or should we say, "Since Windows XP")? Now start WordPad. What do you see? In Windows 7, there are new versions of the popular Paint and WordPad applications.
Both applications include new features such as the ability to paint with all your fingers (on a multitouch machine) or open a Word 2007 .docx document without having Microsoft Office Word 2007 installed on your computer. But the most noticeable change is the new Ribbon user interface.
We are living in an era in which software is everywhere and used by everyone. Alon's 3-yearold son watches TV using Windows Media Center. His mother sends e-mail to her friends, and his home automation system is programmed to control the TV and to send timed e-mail messages-and it also wakes him up every morning by raising the shutters on his bedroom windows. Nowadays software is much more complicated than it used to be. There are many more features, we can do much more with it, and we can use it to help realize our potential. However, the user interface and, more importantly, the user experience provided by most Windows applications has not changed much to support all these new features and uses of software. It's a bit like using a car's steering wheel and pedals to fly an airplane!
The first group within Microsoft to understand that the traditional user interface based on menus and toolbars was failing the user was the Office development team. With each new release of Office, new features were added, but no one found or used them. The product became more and more complicated. The user interface became bloated. People felt that they could do more, but they didn't know how.
In Office 2007, the Office team took another, refreshing, user interface (UI) design approach- instead of thinking about commands, they thought about features. They call it result-oriented design. The Ribbon was born and, with it, a new user experience. Using the power of the modern CPUs combined with visual galleries, the Ribbon can show the outcome of an action whenever the mouse cursor is hovering over the command icons. If you want to set a style, just hover the cursor over each of the style icons in the style gallery. Any style that gets the focus shows you a preview of how the document would change to reflect it. The user just needs to pick the style that makes the document look best. The feature-based design makes Office 2007 much more productive than any older version of Office.
As always, the Office team is the user-interface pioneer. We can find many followers of their fine example by looking at the UI elements in other Microsoft products, such as the new Ribbon support in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) or the Ribbon toolkit for WPF and Windows 7 introduces the Windows Ribbon Framework. It has never been so easy to have a rich user interface and provide a positive user experience in Win32-based applications.
In many modern user-interface frameworks, the UI part is separated from the code that handles UI events and controls the business logic. In the case of the Windows Ribbon Framework, the UI is written using XML-based markup language that is similar to the WPF XAML in many ways, whereas the code-behind compilation unit uses COM as its interfacing technology.