Have you noticed that this equation seems to apply fairly well to nintendo products ?

by order of appearance:

super nintendo, better graphics (output) = success
gameboy, worst graphics (output), not really new input = success
virtual boy, new output method = failure
gamecube, 3D games, "new" output = fair, but not really a success
DS, stylus input, new input = success
WII, wiimote, new input = success
3DS, 3D, new output = bad start (according to nintendo people)

When explaining nintendo's products successes compared to more powerful console, people sometimes say that good graphics are not enough, but good games are important. It seems that novel input also plays a role here... Let's see how this applies to 3DS in a few month...

What is worse, many of these introductory courses were given in C/C++ - producing students who were completely lost when the black box of the C/C++ runtime and libraries was taken away (stl, libstdc++, libc, stdlib/malloc) - e.g. when having to transition to Assembly.

What is worse, many of these introductory courses were given in Assembly - producing students who were completely lost when the black box of the Assembly runtime and libraries was taken away (OS virtual mem) - e.g. when having to transition to an OS-less embedded machine.

What is worse, many of these introductory courses were given in Assembly on powerful CPU - producing students who were completely lost when the black box of the runtime support was taken away (CPU mem protecion, FPU) - e.g. when having to transition to a simpler CPU.

Point is: whatever the language, it always come with support that you don't want to cope with in 95% of the case. Garbage collection (a la java) is one of these. Mem Protection, FPU, virtual memory (remember handles in MacOS before X ?) etc. I don't want to re-implement them, thanks.

ok, I copy a previous message I wrote about ribbon (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1379697&cid=29527359):

In short: Microsoft (which I do not support usually) people has done a lot of work usability-wise (see the end of this msg): no it's not eye-candy.

It's ok for some people used to the old interface to complain: they have to learn new ways of interacting, it's costly, but the designer's bet is that it will pay off in terms of efficiency at the end. ALL interfaces need users to learn before (hopefully) becoming efficient. Changing for changing will only oblige users to forget what they've learnt. But changing for more efficiency is valuable, and that's what Ribbon designers claimed they have done, and it seems the processus they have used to design the thing is good. I think you can't blame them for that.

A link about the story of the Ribbon: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx

In summary:

word 1: 50- menu items Word 2003: 250+ (not counting toolbars, small property windows etc)
something has to be done
design took five years

Designers have:
Visited people at their workplace
Visited people in their home
Invited people into our labs for freeform working and discussion
amassed over 10,000 hours of video of people using Office, Over 3 billion data sessions collected from Office users ~2 million sessions per day
Over the last 90 days, theyâ(TM)ve tracked 352 million command bar clicks in Word
tracked nearly 6000 individual data points

Analysis:
Which commands do people use most?
How are commands commonly sequenced together?
Which commands are accessed via toolbar, mouse, keyboard?
Where do people fail to find functionality theyâ(TM)re asking for(in newsgroups, support calls,etc.)?

They also iterate a lot to find new solutions, and they evaluate the solutions until they were satisfying.

and of course, the supposedly better performances of men at 3D things has nothing to do with culture i.e. how did men/women learn to acquire this ability during childhood ?
"boy, go outside and play football" "girl, why don't you stay inside, and do some paintings instead" - this happens even in today's schools !

and of course, a statistically "significant result" (p.05) is always significant (67% vs 66,9% for example), and can be generalized to everyday activities such as parking a car. And parking a car has nothing to do with the behavior of men looking at you while you do so.

about humor vs discrimination: try replace "women"/"blond" by "jewish/black/arab", and see how your "humor" is impacting your humor-mates.

and the comparison with color-blindness is particularly bad: one knows that he is colorblind, and it's easy to detect. What you think about one woman's ability to drive a car is completely different, its "determinism", "I don't know about (this particular) her, but I generalize on suspicious beliefs, and I take for granted that she's bad at it".

... that in 20 years AI researchers will still foresee major advances in their field in 20 years again, as a justification for politicians to invest in their research (and salary).
Unfortunately, high hopes dating from the seventies had generated much momentum in computer science academics...

I want it... as long as I'm the only one: imagine a large city full of people wanting to benefit from individual flight transportation. What a mess. That's why we have ATC.
And you know what ? we'll have flight routes, which will be overcrowded like ground road, and you will still be a 2h-commuter, just way farther in distance.

So no, it's not a commuting solution. However, I leave 1h30 from the sea, it can be cut to 15 min with this thing...

The debate 'overlapping vs tiling' is as old as window managers [1]... And novel interaction techniques have been explored in 2001, though we are far from the ideas presented in the second paper [2], check the video http://open-video.org/details.php?videoid=8280 ...

cheers.

[1] Myers, B. A. 1988. A Taxonomy of Window Manager User Interfaces. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 8, 5 (Sep. 1988), 65-84. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/38.7762
A taxonomy for the user-visible parts of window managers is presented. It is noted that there are actually very few significant differences, and the differences can be classified in a taxonomy with fairly limited branching. This taxonomy should be useful in evaluating various window managers, and it will also serve as a guide for the issues that need to be addressed by designers if future window-manager user interfaces. The advantages and disadvantages of the various options are presented.

[2] Beaudouin-Lafon, M. 2001. Novel interaction techniques for overlapping windows. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Orlando, Florida, November 11 - 14, 2001). UIST '01. ACM, New York, NY, 153-154. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/502348.502371
This note presents several techniques to improve window management with overlapping windows: tabbed windows, turning and peeling back windows, and snapping and zipping windows.
http://open-video.org/details.php?videoid=8280

disclaimer: I use a Mac, I've never used the Ribbon UI, and I'm an HCI professor. These two facts make me competent to talk about it.

In short: Microsoft (which I do not support usually) people has done a lot of work usability-wise (see the end of this msg): no it's not eye-candy.

It's ok for some people used to the old interface to complain: they have to learn new ways of interacting, it's costly, but the designer's bet is that it will pay off in terms of efficiency at the end. ALL interfaces need users to learn before (hopefully) becoming efficient. Changing for changing will only oblige users to forget what they've learnt. But changing for more efficiency is valuable, and that's what Ribbon designers claimed they have done, and it seems the processus they have used to design the thing is good. I think you can't blame them for that.

A link about the story of the Ribbon: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx

In summary:

word 1: 50- menu items Word 2003: 250+ (not counting toolbars, small property windows etc)
something has to be done
design took five years

Designers have:
Visited people at their workplace
Visited people in their home
Invited people into our labs for freeform working and discussion
amassed over 10,000 hours of video of people using Office, Over 3 billion data sessions collected from Office users ~2 million sessions per day
Over the last 90 days, theyâ(TM)ve tracked 352 million command bar clicks in Word
tracked nearly 6000 individual data points

Analysis:
Which commands do people use most?
How are commands commonly sequenced together?
Which commands are accessed via toolbar, mouse, keyboard?
Where do people fail to find functionality theyâ(TM)re asking for(in newsgroups, support calls,etc.)?

They also iterate a lot to find new solutions, and they evaluate the solutions until they were satisfying.