The ribbon component is quickly becoming the new standard for Microsoft applications. A significant break away from the traditional menu-toolbar approach that has reached its scalability limit faced with ever-increasing amount of features in the Office suite, it is poised to become the main UI concept in the upcoming Microsoft products.
Speaking at Office System Developer Conference in February 2008, Bill Gates said:
We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent [Ribbon] UI quite a bit across a number of applications. […] It turns out it’s a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality.
In his interview, Richard Wolf, general manager of the Microsoft Office Graphics Division detailed the plans for using Ribbon in Visio:
Well, we’ll be announcing that the next version of Visio will feature the new Office “fluent” user interface, or ribbon, which I know has been something many users have been asking us about, so again it’s a question of delivering on what our customers tell us is important to them. The ribbon is key because it allows us to expose more of the functionality of the product. […] The other key benefit that customers will get from the ribbon is a similar way of working to their other Office tools that will make it easier for new users to get up to speed with Visio.
And the recent news confirm the words of Bill Gates. Stephen Chapman has played with an interim build of Windows 7 (next version of Windows OS), and he reports that both Paint and WordPad are now using Ribbon as the primary UI:
MS Paint: In terms of functionality, imagine a software somewhere between the currently-existing MS Paint and the wonderful Paint.NET freeware application. Make everything accessible through a ribbon bar (tabs ‘n all) ala Office 2007 and voila. […] WordPad: Basically, imagine Microsoft taking Office 2007 Word, slimming it down, tweaking the ribbon bar UI a bit, and calling it WordPad. While not as functional as Office 2007 Word (hence, the “slimming it down” mention), this version of WordPad is coming along nicely.
And his next blog entry features a screenshot of Windows 7 Paint in action:
Windows 7 M3 Build 6780 MS Paint UI:
(Click the picture for the full-resolution image)
High-DPI awareness has been the subject of the presentation that i held with Mike Swingler at this year’s JavaOne. This topic has not been getting nearly as much attention as it deserves to, but things might change in the near future.
Ryan Haveson is the program manager lead for the Desktop Graphics team of Windows 7 (the next version of Windows OS). In the article published a few days ago on Windows 7 blog he delves into such areas as scaling modes, programmatic support, current configurations and future plans. One of the main considerations for Windows as the current leader in the desktop presence is backwards compatibility. Ryan’s team must find the right balance between addressing the modern high-resolution hardware and not breaking user experience for older applications:
Our thinking for Windows 7 was that if we enable high DPI out of the box on capable displays, we will enable users to have a full-fidelity experience and also significantly reduce eye strain for on-screen reading. There is even infrastructure available to us to detect a display’s native DPI so we can do a better job of configuring default settings out of the box. However, doing this will also open up the door to expose some issues with applications which may not be fully compatible with high DPI configurations.
As it stands now, applications using GDI have to explicitly scale the visuals:
One of the issues is that for GDI applications to be DPI aware, the developer must write code to scale the window frame, text size, graphical buttons, and layout to match the scaling factor specified by the DPI setting. Applications which do not do this may have some issues. Most of these issues are minor, such as mismatched font sizes, or minor layout artifacts, but some applications have major issues when run at high DPI settings.
While Vista (as well as XP) provide automatic scaling, this results in blurry visuals that do not utilize the full potential of high-resolution monitors:
In the case of automatic scaling, applications which are not DPI aware are automatically scaled by the window manager. The text size matches the user preference, but it also introduces a blurry effect for that application’s window as a result.
It is not clear from this posting what are the exact plans for the next Windows release. The conclusion section is very uncommitting and vague, but it is very encouraging to see that Microsoft is joining Apple and KDE / Gnome in providing tools to scale the UIs to match the current desktop hardware. In fact, the upcoming release 8 of Internet Explorer boasts full support for High DPI mode (though the quote on “entire awareness” of Vista is exaggerated as can be seen from the screenshots in our JavaOne presentation):
Like Windows Vista, the Internet Explorer 8 UI is entirely Hi-DPI Aware. You will also notice that all UI elements and UI fonts are scaled accordingly and that icons are larger and have higher fidelity. Notice the difference in the Internet Explorer chrome when Windows DPI Scaling is set to 96 DPI and 120 DPI, respectively:
Internet Explorer Chrome at 96 DPI.
Internet Explorer Chrome at 120 DPI.
It is quite illuminating to read the comments on this entry. Some readers call for the monitor manufacterers to effectively stop the progress and agree on a fixed pixel size:
The physical size in inches should be proportional to resolution in pixels. If [manufacterers] increase the resolution without making the screen larger, it’s obvious that we have problems for reading! I don’t think Microsoft should modify Windows because monitor makers are doing silly things. There should be an international standard for pixel size and font readability.
And going even further to follow Apple’s route:
MAC App developers don’t have to worry about DPI or non-square pixels because Apple has full control over the specification of the MAC monitors. Why Windows can’t do the same and completely remove the scaling burden from app developers? Microsoft should use its influence on PC manufacturers and ask them to build monitors to Windows certified specification.
One reader points to a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem:
Programmers don’t bother with DPI aware apps, because all mainstream monitors have their physical DPI @ 96. And monitor makers don’t bother with making bigger DPI monitors, because apps aren’t there yet. The only solution I see, is to bite the bullet and at default make Windows adjust to the native resolution/DPI.
And a sane voice points to a solution that does not involve user intervention at all, hiding the pixel-point-inch impedance behind the scenes:
Windows 7 should automatically set your monitor at its native resolution. It should then determine the best dpi for your display and automatically scale the entire OS to it, afterwards if you want to set it at a different dpi then you can.
While the hardware technology of high-resolution monitors does not progress at nearly the same rate as other parts of the consumer-oriented market (CPU, GPU, RAM, hard disk, etc), it is evolving nonetheless. The major operating systems and windowing toolkits differ in their level of support. Hopefully, Microsoft’s awareness of the importance of this subject will not be significantly hampered by the shackles of backwards compatibility.
I am extremely pleased today to announce the availability of official releases for a number of my Swing projects. Synchronizing the release schedules for these projects allows the applications to take stable and well-tested libraries that allow creating modern user interfaces.
Flamingo component suite release 3.1 (code-named Eilinora) is available. The goal of the project is to provide a small and cohesive set of powerful UI components with functionality similar to or superseding that of Vista Explorer and Office 2007, and this release closes many gaps towards realizing this goal. The release notes have the detailed description of the new functionality. Noteable features include:
- Improvements to SVG transcoder, allowing creating resizable icons. This is used in the new ribbon demoes to make significant performance improvements to the startup phase.
- Contextual task groups on the ribbon component.
- Dynamic content of in-ribbon galleries.
- Decorating the ribbon under Substance plugin, putting the taskbar and contextual task group headers on the title pane.
- Resizable icons based on .ICO format.
- Command buttons supporting disabled mode, changing text and changing font.
- Auto-repeat mode on command buttons.
- Column-fill mode on command button panels.
Substance look-and-feel release 5.0 is available. Substance has undergone significant internal and external changes to address major performance issues and to ensure the long-term code health of the project. Here is the list of big changes in Substance 5.0:
- Moving to Java 6 as the minimum runtime requirement.
- Addressing the performance issues. While the first announced drop was 20% faster than release 4.3, the release candidate is 3.5 times faster on static scenarios and 2.7 times faster on dynamic scenarios as measured by the LightBeam testbed.
- New client property to allow using per-window skins.
- Enhanced theming layer.
- Removed 16 VM flags and left only 2.
- Removed 15 client properties, consolidated 3 others into 2 and added 1 new.
- Removed 54 API methods on the main class, pushing some functionality into the theming layer.
- Consolidated theme pack, watermark pack and button shaper pack into the Extras pack that also provides additional skins.
The following sub-projects are also available as official releases:
Version 4.3 of Substance (the last version that can run on Java 5) is in long-term support mode. At the present moment this version has thirteen bug fixes backported to it from the main development trunk.
Click on the button below to launch a signed WebStart demo that shows the available Substance features:
Click on the button below to launch a WebStart demo that shows the Flamingo ribbon component under Substance look-and-feel:
Click on the button below to launch a signed WebStart demo that shows the SwingX components under Substance:
In addition to Substance and Flamingo that can be used directly by applications, the following projects haven also been officially released:
- Laf-Plugin release 1.0 (code-named Vile Weed) is available. The goal of this project is to provide a generic plugin framework for look-and-feels and define the interface of a common kind of plugins – the component plugins.
- Laf-Widget release 4.0 (code-named Iris) is available. The goal of this project is to provide support for and base set of additional behaviour and widgets in look-and-feels.
- Rainbow release 1.1 (code-named Nightstone) is available. The goal of this project is to illustrate various animation, transition and translucency techniques.
It has been a long journey. Flamingo 3.1 development has started in February, and i would like to thank Gunnar A. Reinseth, Pedro Duque Vieira, Kenneth Flynn in particular for their invaluable feedback during the development cycle. Substance 5.0 development has started in April, and i would like to thank all the early adopters for testing the development drops and providing their feedback in the project forums and mailing lists.
The work on both Flamingo and Substance is not finished. The plans for the next Flamingo release are available at the end of this entry, and plans for the next Substance releases will be published on this blog. If you are interested in using Substance to its fullest potential, you’re welcome to read the “From Photoshop to code” series.
Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during the last week:
