The Office User Interface blog is reporting that Microsoft will be offering to licence their new ‘ribbon’ user interface design to third party developers to use in their applications.
It’s free, provided you accept their licence, and that you’re not making a product that competes with any of the Office apps.
It’s an interesting move, as clearly Microsoft do want to push forward this UI change for the future. My personal view on the new Office ribbon UI (which contrasts with Huw’s views) is that it looks terribly inconsistent with the rest of Vista. In fact, to me, Vista looks horribly inconsistent, with some apps having menus, some not… but that’s a different story. What this hopefully will mean will be that in the future we’ll start seeing more consistency among all Windows apps, whether MS or third party.
Unfortunately, it seems Microsoft’s site is experiencing a few problems and I can’t at the moment read the licence terms (I’m also not a lawyer, so it probably wouldn’t be very easy to read).
