User Interface Blog

Today I had a look at Jensen Harris Office User Interface Blog and read his post about the newly published and royalty-free licensing of the Microsoft Office user interface. There is a lot of discussion about Jennsen’s blog post. Many people raise question about what exactly is licensed: the concept of the ui, new Office look and feel or new code. Others complain that it should not be possible to license the concept of user interface, whereas others think this is a great step forward to publish the standard.

I think that the User Interface Guidelines Preview is interesting to read and that it is full of new ui ideas, approaches and guidelines. I wonder about how much of this will be used by the user interface of new released Microsoft software.

External Links:

• 2007 Microsoft Office System User Interface Licensing web site
• User Interface Guidelines Preview (A short excerpt of the actual guidelines)
• How to misuse the Office 2007 Ribbon
• Being a responsible open source developer

The new Microsft Vista operating system has been released. The Java community has put a lot of work into verifying that it can work correctly on the Vista operating system. For best results you need to use the new major JDK 6 release or if an update is not possible in the given timeframe then you can use the newly released JDK 5 Update 11 release.

The Eclipse community has also done a great job getting SWT on Vista. The latest Eclipse release 3.3 M5 milestone contains SWT updates to ensure it can runs well on the new Vista user interface.

External Links