But in the ideal world you’re wrong... it’s fundamentally easier to start with a mobile design and make some specific interventions to make it work well on desktop than to do the opposite.
Whether anyone actually makes those interventions is, as you indicate, somewhat unlikely.
Some people also use it like a USB dongle, and drop files up manually, then download them on computers they don't have installation privileges on.
With JavaScript disabled, you get a big white page of nothing. Not to mention the full screen menu as was mentioned.
At least Dropbox hasn't gone full in on the Heiroglyph side of the fad, they still have text labels for buttons, so you can understand what they do by looking at them and reading them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris_myth#Death_and_resurrec...
I've tried Word and Excel, both behaved so.
Insane!
Stupidity is contagious. And Microsoft's idea of innovation is copying what the others do and brake it beyond all repair.
> I've tried Word and Excel, both behaved so.
> Insane!
I'm shocked you used such a © "word". The new way to have fun is to be in a meeting and see the presenter trying for 5 minutes to find something in the ribbon menu.
Microsoft Office switched to the "backstage" menu in Office 2010, long before full-screen menus became a popular pattern. Office 2007 had the app menu, which is the same as the File menu in the Windows File Explorer. In my opinion, the app menu is far superior simply because it doesn't change the context and it's easily dismissable.
> The new way to have fun is to be in a meeting and see the presenter trying for 5 minutes to find something in the ribbon menu.
The Ribbon is far superior to the old teetering tower of random menus, toolbars, and panels. Everything is in a single logical place, with (almost) every button having a text label and many having intuitive icons. And now it has a search bar.
They've obscured the "save as" functionality and really push one drive saving. Even as a one-drive user, oftentimes I just want to save a file on my disk in a specific spot without backing it up to the cloud.
I really wish Libreoffice Calc was a better Excel replacement, because it feels like Excel gets more dumbed-down each year. I get a UTF-8 csv emailed daily from a vendor, and I still can't get Excel to treat it properly. It only applies that setting to that specific file, I can't change it system-wide. Maybe it's possible, I found it easier to just write a python script to convert the files to windows-1250 like it expects.
The ribbon is far superior to the old menus though, this week I needed to create a shudder PowerPoint presentation. Don't think I've needed to do that in 5 years, but it was easy enough to find all the functionality I needed. Plus, the search box actually shows where the buttons are located, so you actually learn how to use the program instead of relying on search. I remember the mess the Office 07 menus were, any time there was a need to use a feature that wasn't familiar was a chore. I remember actually needing to Google for some excel feature and needing to rely on screenshots of the menus to find what I needed. I don't get it, since Visual Studio has far more complexity buried in it than Word, but I've never had anywhere near the difficulty finding features than I did with the old Office menus.
https://superuser.com/questions/642978/change-the-behavior-o...
Clicking on the File menu gets you
"Protect Document -- Protect Document"
"Check for Issues -- Inspect Document"
and
"Manage Versions -- Versions"
effectively as the only "obvious choices" with two different wordings (why?) and with a lot of "stuff" left and right "Properties" "Related Dates" "Related People" ? It's specifically not obvious that the "menu" is in the blue area on the left and that the three buttons are... what are they actually? How come these three came to be the major actions one would want to do in the File menu?
And why the document disappeared like I'm on the small mobile screen? I'm aware now they did that for many years, still... it's... confusing on the big screen.
That's been the case for I think a decade now. Maybe longer.
To be fair, now days they make really good use of that space. Earlier iterations of that UI were pretty bad, but a giant list of recent documents, a list of recent document templates, and all the main commands to do things (save, open) are positions to the left where they have always been.
Given that Word now days auto-saves (about time!), the main thing I'm going into the File menu for is to switch to a different file, at which point the file menu showing me a list of, well, files, is pretty useful to be honest.
Also it has a search box, and search boxes are nice, I welcome UI changes that allow for more search boxes in the world.
Strange it doesn't do local, but I imagine there are legacy reasons for that. Everything in Office is old. Often it is crazy well engineered, but decisions set in stone decades ago still linger on.
YMMV
Esp. when the target machine the code had to run on was a 486 with a slow hard drive and a tiny bit of memory.
Of course Office updated their file format, but they probably did it a little bit too soon. I always wondered what would've happened if they had waited a few more years, released in 2007, so probably design started a few years prior. Talk about just being a smidgen too early for a world of unlimited(-ish) data and always on internet connections.
Oops.
And then spent nearly 5 minutes trying to get back to "Regular Dropbox".
But wait... I'm at the root of dropbox.com. Is... Dropbox "non-business" dead? I stopped using it a while ago because of their inexorable push into "enterprise" features that I didn't care about, but I never expected them to outright kill the product.
Edit: It's actually the width that matters. After reducing it a bit it will show the hamburger menu.
It's fair to criticize specific visual and UX design details, but it's a bit much to take this as any indication that Dropbox doesn't care about desktop users (especially Dropbox) or that everything is being "mobilified."
You never used a computer? There is a thing called a mouse which you have to move to the bottom of the screen to select the bloody thing. I'm shocked that Alan Kay did had the glorious idea of the full screen menu.
> It's fair to criticize specific visual and UX design details, but it's a bit much to take this as any indication that Dropbox doesn't care about desktop users (especially Dropbox) or that everything is being "mobilified."
How to say it without resorting to medical condition: to throw away years of working things in GUI and to come with an "UX" which has the functionality of windows 1.0 shows some mental development problems to say the least.
But here is the upper part of what I can see: https://imgur.com/eRFnDo6
Isn't is beautiful? How the image layer is put over half of the text line?
Oh, and the right part (white background) only appears after a couple of seconds. At first it shows the continuation of the blue background scree, with 2 'menu' items: "Se connecter" (log in) and "S'inscrire" (sign in). So if you try to click on "sign in", by the time your click is registered, it ends up on the white background item which appears at the same place: "Télécharger" (download).
Wonderful.
Wow that is sloppy.
For me the hamburger button's media query is set to a width of 1366px.
I don't have a dropbox account. I do notice no matter what I always end up at `https://www.dropbox.com/?landing=dbv2`, so I may somehow be being put into an AB test. Even an incognito window does that. The name `dbv2` might imply a new version of the site that is in the works? Shrug.
Yours looks like https://www.dropbox.com/business
My desktop isn't a tablet - stop trying to make it one!
I'm sure vertical space is the most often-repeated argument, but I'm skeptical that it's indeed the reason behind this trend.
I tried a 36", I can't stand it as a display. Fine for a TV, but it's a little much for a monitor. Although I can't stand more than 2 displays, so YMMV.
Ironically, I do enable them on my tablet, because I don't always have a keyboard attached to it. Tablets generally have enough space for full menus / toolbars, and lacking a keyboard they're arguably the form factor most in need of them.
I know about the "Alt" key, but I find the need to press that to pop up the menu to be incredibly annoying.
I use the menu really frequently -- for pretty much anything that isn't a toolbar button.
I tend not to use keyboard shortcuts generally, but particularly if I'm just reading a website -- in that situation, my hands are on the mouse, not the keyboard, and moving to the keyboard to type a shortcut is more inconvenient than just being able to use two clicks on a menu.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Also I miss typing ".." in the URL bar to go to my home page (I'll admit this was an iexplore quirk, albeit a really convenient one...)
Edit: apparently on PCs the per-window menu is activated with Alt, TIL
Why can't we just have sites/apps/SPAs/whatever that look and work well on whatever device they supposedly support?
Indeed. There seems to be a weird idea that it's possible to make a UI that works well on all form factors. I don't see how that's possible, and I've never seen it happen in practice.
What actually happens is that you have a UI that works well on one form factor and badly on the others, or you have a UI that works poorly on them all.
This is why we have media queries in CSS!
Placing the cursor in text by imitating the new cursor catch and place game of iOS will be also fun. Probably so much fun that quite a number of people will stay longer in the office to play with it.
That said, the menu bar has already taken serious damage by the introduction of OS X, when the first menu item became the variable width application name. Before this, the File and Edit menus and their essential menu items were exactly on the same place in every application, rendering the most essential commands a matter of muscle memory, quite like a guesture.
Thank you to the poster below for the "alt" shortcut and for reminding me I can change the settings!
I don't have a problem with the concept of the hamburger except what they put in it is less useful than the menu bar.
I don't drive much, these days; but even as a passenger, they do my head in. No More Hamburgers! Boo!
Game over. Do you want to play another game?
(...you know - material ui is the new shit. I wonder what are they smoking, i would _love_ to try it too)
What I hate even worse though is endless scroll... give me damn pagination with buttons! So I can reload the page and not worry about losing my spot, or accidentally scrolling away... let me use the back button on my browser!
It's like proliferation of electron apps, or how even the prosumer SLR / MILC camera market is dying as smartphone cameras get better and better.
If you consider that a tablet is a "computing device" then my washing machine is also one.
> It's like proliferation of electron apps, or how even the prosumer SLR / MILC camera market is dying as smartphone cameras get better and better.
They get "better and better" because they are crap. As U2 said: even better than the real thing.
Also, I want to know what brain dead MS designer decided that multitasking different control panel windows was a Bad Thing, and put the whole settings section into a single window that can't be separated. Do these people even use their own OS?
It would work really well as a "menu" for a touch-based OS, even.
There's nothing good about it that you couldn't do better with customizable toolbars before.
If there are ways to customize it now, I'm not smart enough to do it anymore.
Right click, customize the ribbon. You can set it up however you want.
Or just set it to show only tabs and treat it like a fancy menu bar.
Or hide it completely and just use the command search feature Office apps have in them now. It is like a command line with amazing auto-complete. Alt-q to jump to search.
It's just unfortunate, because it started the trend of reducing and hiding functionality. With less examples of what high density software looked and worked like, people don't even know what they are missing.
Then they briefly tried to push the one interface for every device holy grail with Windows 8 and UWP. Thankfully that was abortove, but it's still poisoned things more and hurt information density in its fallout.
Did you tried to use it ? For every god damn thing i try to find in the ribbon i lose 5 minutes. That's what i call "hiding functionality" .
Microsoft have put together an awesome guide to the Ribbon. Even if you're not making one, it's a great read that really goes into the reasons it exists: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-r.... I came across this page by chance when I was in high school, and I think it was what sparked my interest in user interface and user experience design.
I think a lot of mobile designs underestimate the natural information density of phones too.