#Which microsoft program for mac Pc
#Which microsoft program for mac windows 8
#Which microsoft program for mac series
#Which microsoft program for mac mac

Jensen Harris, who led the development of the original ribbon in Office 2007, wrote an eight-part series of blog posts titled “Why the UI?”

#Which microsoft program for mac windows 8

The Windows 8 blog, with its epic posts from Steven Sinofsky and the Windows team, is just the latest in a long line of similar efforts. In the last five years, Microsoft engineers and executives have written the equivalent of several big books about the process of designing and building the user interface for Windows and Office. One enormous difference between Microsoft and Apple is the amount of public communication each company puts out. I’ve included a description of those principles and some conclusions here. Ultimately, the decisions that UI designers at Apple and Microsoft have settled on reflect much larger design principles. With iPhoto, Apple has editing tools in menus and editing panes, with access to some common tasks well hidden. Microsoft’s design puts every photo-editing tool in the ribbon. This is where the comparison is most interesting. You really can’t ask for a better head-to-head comparison than this: Microsoft’s ribbon versus the traditional pull-down menus used in iPhoto. There are a surprising number of similarities between the two programs, and one very large difference. Here’s an index, if you want to jump straight to a specific page. I’ve divided the comparison into four distinct areas, each of which gets its own page. I’ve taken a task-centric approach here so that I can show the similarities and highlight the differences. Some of the differences between the two programs are purely esthetic, but there are significant functional differences as well.

#Which microsoft program for mac mac

If you’re a Mac user, you can see how the Windows UI has evolved in the past five years. If you’re a Windows user, you can see where Microsoft has “borrowed” from Apple. My goal isn’t to declare a winner, but rather to provide a more detailed look at each program’s design and to discuss the design principles underlying each one. In this post, I’ll show you what you have to do to accomplish specific tasks using these two programs. It’s fair to say both companies have made major investments and placed big bets here. Managing digital photos is something everyone everywhere does with their computer. Digital photos figure prominently in advertising from both Apple and Microsoft. At the time, Apple called iPhoto’s user interface “simple and elegant.”Īt its “Back to the Mac” event in late 2010, Apple chose to lead off the announcements with iLife ’11, and iPhoto was up first. Both Microsoft and Apple recently released significant updates to their flagship digital photo management/editing programs in the past year: Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 makes extensive use of the ribbon Apple’s iPhoto ’11 represents the latest iteration of a product that was introduced in 2002. But are those opinions justified?Īs it turns out, there is a nearly perfect test case we can use to compare the two companies’ approaches to user interface design. Mac users have heaped scorn on Microsoft’s decision to adopt the ribbon throughout Windows 8, saying they prefer Apple’s “simple and elegant” user interface designs. That widespread lack of recent experience makes the recent debate over Microsoft’s Windows 8 interface choices even more muddled. Most Mac switchers hear “Windows” and visualize the interfaces from whatever versions of Windows and Office they used before they switched-usually Windows XP and Office 2003-that have been radically overhauled. They get to compare their modern Apple experience with the memory of a Microsoft product they literally rejected, and naturally they prefer the present. Even worse, the millions of Mac users who switched in the past few years have only distant (and probably painful) memories of old Microsoft products. The overwhelming majority of Windows users have no hands-on experience with a Mac.

#Which microsoft program for mac Pc

Among PC and Mac users worldwide, most use one platform regularly and rarely if ever use the other. The trouble is, most people don’t have enough experience to back those opinions up. Everyone has an opinion about user interfaces.