A person who is very knowledgeable about memoQ and is a keen observer of Kilgray (hello, Paul!) recently emailed me with this capture, dug out from the depths of Twitter.
Oh my. That really was me. I really said that, on more than one occasion. And now here we are, releasing memoQ 2014 R2 with a ribbon. What’s my defense?
It was a bit more than a year ago, exactly on Día de muertos, that a nagging thought gained strength in my mind and morphed into resolve: memoQ should get a ribbon. There were two key things that convinced me, really. First, the ribbon has an unparalleled benefit: you can turn it off! That saves you space when you’re working in the editor, which is where every well-groomed translator and reviewer will spend 99.9% of their time. The editor is an interface that’s been geared for keyboard shortcuts, so unless you’re in a discovery phase, you most likely don’t want you attention distracted by anything from the text itself. That fits nicely with our immersive editor concept, or the idea of Zen software, if you like – software that gets out of the way and lets you stay in the flow.
The second argument also has to do with space, specifically the more precious vertical kind of screen real estate. I realized adding a context-sensitive ribbon would allow us to get rid of those blue links that have just kept growing in numbers, right under the list of documents, translation memories etc.
Once I sold both myself and Kilgray’s main visionary, István, on the idea, our team got to work. And this is where credit is due to Mónika Antunovics, who chose to ignore my initial suggestions to play it safe and just map existing menus to a ribbon, and came up with something brilliant: let’s lay out our commands in the natural order of things. You start a project for a job, you pick your documents, get your word counts, do some preparation steps like pre-translating and locking segments, them move on to translate and review. This was a big departure from the way things used to be, but Mónika was absolutely right.
So where does that leave us with respect to product managers making irresponsible statements, and their dead bodies? I stand by what I said then, and I stand by what we’re doing know. My knowledge of the world is different from what it was two years ago, and the world has also changed. Sticking with old opinions when they no longer hold true would be silly.
Now another year has passed, and in just about two weeks we are releasing memoQ 2014 R2 with the ribbon. We missed Día de muertos, and the product manager is in good health. If you can, take some time and enjoy Mexico’s brilliant, single-minded and often morbid syncretic art, then return to memoQ’s cheerful new ribbon for your next job. And whenever you tweet, remember that message will be around longer than yourself.
Gábor Ugray
Head of Innovation at memoQ
