Exclusive! Office vNext UI revealed!!!

As we have seen from the UI in the Windows Live Wave 3 products and the leaked Windows 7 M3 screenshots, Microsoft is moving towards a more typographical UI. Which means they are eliminating all icons from the user interface and moving towards a more textual user interface, as can be noticed from the following screen shots:

In keeping with this new UI philosophy, the next version of Office, code named Office vNext, too will have a typographical user interface. And I have exclusive access to a screenshot of a very early version of this UI!

I present to you the Home tab of Word vNext!…

Compare this to the Word 2007 Home tab:

As we can see, Word vNext’s Home tab is really easy on the eyes and makes the user concentrate on the task at hand rather than the user interface itself.

Now, this redesign of the Office vNext UI is in a very preliminary stage and Microsoft is looking to eliminate all icons, including the Office button. Microsoft is also looking at bleaching the UI with white or shades of white in keeping with the new design philosophy.

Since Microsoft never makes drastic changes to the UI without some kind of feedback, it is believed that the new typographical user interface philosophy is driven by extensive user group study data.

Microsoft has not yet finalized on this user interface model and is further investigating ways to make the user interface even more typographical. Their ultimate aim is to hit the clear, confident and disconnected user interface of the classic MS-DOS editor, edit.com.

Windows Live Calendar (Wave 3) Screen Shots

Screen shots of Windows Live Calendar (Wave 3) on Firefox 3 under openSUSE 10.3 GNU/Linux.

Windows Live Calendar - Didn't load right the first time.

Windows Live Calendar (Wave 3)

Windows Live Calendar: View - Day

Windows Live Calendar: View - Week

Windows Live Calendar: View - Month

Windows Live Calendar: View - Agenda

Windows Live Calendar: View - To-Do

Windows Live Calendar: Add Event

Windows Live Calendar: Add To-Do

Windows Live Calendar: Options menu

Windows Live Calendar: Theme mouse-over live preview.

Windows Live Calendar: Wave 3 header and 'Menu' drop-down.

Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer memory usage comparison.

Google Chrome has a cool built-in feature that lists the memory usage of all currently running browsers. This can be accessed by bringing up the Chrome Task Manager using Shift+Esc and then clicking on ‘Stats for nerds’. Or just type ‘about:memory’ into the Chrome Omnibar.

So I thought I would do a simple memory usage comparison by opening my most frequently used web applications.

Tab 1: Google Gmail (https://gmail.google.com)

Tab 2: Google Reader (https://www.google.com/reader)

Tab 3: Google Calendar (https://www.google.com/calendar)

I opened the same 3 tabs in Google Chrome (beta), Mozilla Firefox 3.01 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 (Beta 2) and then opened the memory page in Chrome.  All three browser sessions were started afresh.

Looking at just the ‘Private’ memory column, IE8 is a memory hog while Chrome and Firefox use similar amounts of memory.

I am pretty impressed at how well the Chrome beta works compared to IE8 beta 2.

Download Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome

Download Firefox: http://www.firefox.com

Download IE8 beta2: http://www.microsoft.com/ie8

Chrome is currently available for Windows XP and Vista only. Mac and Linux versions are on the way.

IE8 is available for Windows XP and Vista only.