We also have a *very* widely used app that we sell globally, and there weren't any howls of indignation when we switched to a ribbon. Most of our users like it--a lot. We went to considerable trouble to ensure that users could stay with the old menus if they preferred, but metrics show that almost no one is. It's all in the design. A well-designed ribbon is faster and easier to use than tiered menus, and key functionality is highlighted. One of the interesting things our metrics show is that features that used to be buried in the menus are now getting much more use--apparently a lot of users didn't even know the features existed; now they do. We spent a LOT more man-hours designing the ribbon than coding it.

We switched to a ribbon in our product. We've had almost no complaints from users, and many compliments. A well-designed ribbon exposes the application's most-used functionality with fewer clicks--sometimes many fewer. Our users can get to our most-used functionality with a single click, and they very rarely need more than two. I use the app myself many times a day, and I absolutely hate it when I have to work with the old menus (yes, we do support both UIs, although we no longer update the menus with new functionality). The hard part of ribbons is the design, not the coding. If you just take your old menus and translate them to a ribbon, you're wasting your time. You have to view the app functionally: What do the users do most often, and how can we organize our functionality most logically and conveniently? Were our users asking for a ribbon? Absolutely not. Does that mean we shouldn't have done it? Absolutely not. Sometimes users don't know that they want something until you've shown it to them.

SK Genius wrote:

I may have to think of a new and fantastical word then start some kind of group to get it into [the OED].

"Oedible" It's the new word AND it's self-referential: "oedible" is itself oedible.

Ghastly is right, but it's bigger that just using jobs as verbs. Apparently it's now OK to use any noun as a verb. There's "gifting" ("Due to the economic situation. we're cutting back on our gifting this Christmas"), the ever-popular "impacting" ("The economy is impacting our gifting"). and so many more. I blame the bidnessmen. They like to invent their own language and then use it to impress other bidnessmen. They are needlessly upsizing the language, the result of which is downsizing the meaning of everything they say. People just need to stop verbing nouns, period.

I don't use either, but my kids do, and I can tell you this much. One of them had an iPod and one had a Zune. The Zune kid was always mad because the iPod kid was constantly stealing the Zune. Problem now solved because the iPod kid saved up enough to buy a Zune.

What's wrong with 'FooManagers'? There's a nice little convention (I first noticed it in VB though it undoubtedly started somewhere else) that if class A is a collection of class B objects, the name for class A is simply the plural of the name of class B. So, an 'Items' object is a collection of 'Item' objects. Items[i] is--an Item. Simple, obvious, works in most cases.