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Forums » Prof-UIS Tech Support » Customisable ribbon bar? Collapse All
Subject Author Date
Robert Webb Jun 30, 2009 - 7:59 PM

Do you have any plans to provide any of the following?


- Allow ribbon bar to be resized.  Our customers are already complaining about our software’s new ribbon bar taking up too much screen space.  I think it could work well if the ribbon bar could be resized to some discreet steps, eg to 2/3 or 1/3 normal size.  In either case large icons would never be used (regardless of resizing rules).  Instead, either one or two rows of smaller icons would appear, with or without text depending on room available as usual.


- Customisation of controls on the ribbon bar itself.  Controls can be happily dragged between toolbars and menus, but the ribbon bar is conspicuously rigid.  The Quick Access bar is a poor substitute.  I know the ribbon bar is more complicated, with various arrangement options, but I still think a simple drag/drop customisation could work.  It would give the control some default arrangement settings, and maybe right-click on the control after dropping for other options.  Probably means the customisationo system would need to know about small and large icons.


I know Prof-UIS intention is to do a limitation-for-limitation copy of the ribbon bar in MS Word etc, but these are really vitally important features for any modern interface.  So just wondering if such things are planned, and if so, any idea when we might see them?


Thanks,


Rob.

Technical Support Jul 1, 2009 - 9:02 AM

Thank you for the interesting questions. The ribbon bar elements (buttons and text/combo fields) are organized into groups. In the most cases, the elements of each group have the information level adjustment rules for controlling element sizes built for correctly looking size changing of each element. For example, some group has 4 buttons. The 1st is always big. The next 3 can be big at the same time, middle (small with text) at the same time or small without text at the same time. The current state of last 3 buttons is controlled by the information level adjustment rules and free space available in the ribbon bar. If we allow vertical resizing of the ribbon bar or drag-n-drop based button inserting into this group of ribbon buttons, then the behavior of it may become broken in some cases. If we insert 2 or 3 buttons into this group to the end of buttons list at right and make new 2/3 buttons working like previously last 3 buttons, then the behavior of the ribbon group will work correctly. But if we insert one always big button between last 3 buttons, then the group behavior will work not in the best looking way.

It’s possible to change height of the ribbon and make it able to contain more or less rows of buttons in each ribbon group, but it’s not possible to resize the ribbon vertically in the current Prof-UIS version. The CExtRibbonPage::RibbonLayout_GetGroupHeight() virtual method returns height of ribbon groups.

We are going to implement the new ribbon customization dialog page based on 2 tree controls and the new Customize Ribbon context menu command. Such dialog page is present in the ribbon customization dialog of Office 2010. The left tree control contains all the available commands organized into groups. The right tree control exactly describes the current structure of the ribbon bar: top level of tree items are ribbon pages, second level is ribbon groups, third level are buttons, text/combo fields and galleries, the next levels are trees of ribbon menus. Here is how it looks in Outlook:

http://www.prof-uis.com/download/forums/CustomizeRibbon-dialog-in-Office2010.PNG

Robert Webb Jul 2, 2009 - 12:08 AM

Any idea when we could expect the customizable ribbon bar to appear in Prof-UIS?  By the end of the year maybe?


The Office 2010 customization is a good start, but it looks very dry and unintuitive.  Much better would be to just drag controls directly into the ribbon bar.  I understand the problem you explain with mixing large/small icons, but that problem will also exist with the 2010 method, and it’s the user’s problem if they arrange things that way.  I see no way to tell an item to stay large/small in 2010 which would be useful (just looking at your screenshot).  After dragging and dropping, the right-click context menu on the button would be a good place for a few options like this.


When you say "it’s possible to change height of the ribbon bar", you don’t mean it’s possible now, right?  You mean it would be possible for you to implement that feature sometime in the future?  It would be great if you could.  I wonder how hard-coded ideas like one-large-icon-per-column and three-small-icons-per-column are.


It would also be nice if ribbon groups were resized in more steps.  Currently all items in a group are reformatted to match.  That is, they are all large, or all small with text, or all small without text (aside from items which have been forced in-code to stay in a given state).  As a group shrinks it would be much better to just change the last three items to small (or less if there’s a separator), and then the three before that and so on.  If one is left over at the far left of the group, then it would always stay large since no space could be saved, unless hiding text too (and there’d be no need to force it to stay large in code).  I don’t know what Office does, but I know other ribbon implementations perform more gradual resizing like this.


Thanks,


Rob.

Technical Support Jul 2, 2009 - 11:59 AM

The customizable toolbars and menus allow to drag-n-drop buttons. But this UI feature is too complex probably for 50% of people living on this planet. We can tell the same about ribbon if it will support drag-n-drop based customization. Such drag-n-drop is like design mode for software developer. The Office 2010 customization for ribbon bar does the same as drag-n-drop customization. Probably the final version will support drag-n-dropping too. But nobody knows this right now. At this moment we are much more busy on developing 2010 UI themes (Office and Studio). The new ribbon customization is the second task planned as feature of Prof-UIS 2.87. It would be nice to allow editing of resizing rules of each ribbon button. This can be implemented as additional button in each tree row displaying modal dialog box with rule editing grid control. Each row of rule editing grid describes when to switch to the next button state and which button state is next. But in any case, the incorrect layout of buttons inside each group of buttons is problem of designer: either user or developer. It’s a problem of a man who created this layout.

As we said, you can override the CExtRibbonPage::RibbonLayout_GetGroupHeight() virtual method to change height of ribbon groups. You can do this in any Prof-UIS version which has ribbon bar. You can do this right now. The simple ribbon groups (like Clipboard in MS Word) are placing buttons inside group via searching free space for them from top to bottom in first column of buttons at left, then next column closer to right and so on. I.e. the simple ribbon groups placing buttons into vertical column. If the CExtRibbonPage::RibbonLayout_GetGroupHeight() virtual method will return a higher vertical size of button group, then larger count of buttons appear in each column of buttons. The toolbar like ribbon buttons (like Font in MS Word) are placing buttons into horizontal rows. Honestly saying, we think you have reason to make the ribbon bar smaller and you never have reason to make it larger. The ribbon bar looks like a lot of buttons and other items gathered on an enough small place. It looks like it’s better to make the count of buttons less - not greater.

The ribbon height changing we described above is available right now. But it’s the static size changing. The ribbon bar does not support splitter like area for dynamic height changing at run time.

Robert Webb Jul 2, 2009 - 8:13 PM

If it’s useful to the other 50% or 3.5 billion people, then I’d consider it a win :-)


I take it there’s no beta of 2.87 available yet?  What happened to 2.86?


Will 2.87 fix the slow response time for ribbon bars with any of the Office 2007 themes?


Sorry, I midunderstood regarding RibbonLayout_GetGroupHeight().  I thought you were just telling me how to get the height.  I have tried overriding this now and reducing the height, but it isn’t much use.  It always decided only one row of smaller buttons will now fit, even when there’s room for two.  Other than that it just truncated the ribbon bar rather than resizing it.  The border around groups is truncated, not adjusted for the new height (losing the group’s caption), and the one row of buttons is always centred vertically according to the old height, thus also being truncated.  Large icons are also still used when they no longer fit.


Thanks,


Rob.

tera tera Jul 1, 2009 - 7:36 PM

Where can I download Outlook 2010?

Please teach it if you like

Technical Support Jul 2, 2009 - 11:56 AM

It seems Outlook 2010 was given to some Microsoft partners only for testing purposes. So we cannot help you with this.