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@wkai

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned to you already, but your design lacks one of the most important distinctions of such an interface design. Namely, very clear visual separation of the different groups of buttons. At the moment, your mockups show all the icons on one flat plane, there needs to be a strong visual separation between 'Group1' and 'Group2' etc. Otherwise, the user is confused as to where the logical separation of the different 'groups' are and all the buttons are mashed together in one big mess.

when we will see it in kde applications ? *waiting*

what is the principal difference from the side panels in koffice ?

@wkai
You do it using Kinetic?

Cool, +1

ash wrote:when we will see it in kde applications ? *waiting*

what is the principal difference from the side panels in koffice ?

There are a few that I can think of off the top of my head:
1. KOffice uses the panels for tools regarding the document, whereas it still uses a toolbar for actions on the file, such as save, new, open, undo etc.
2. KOffice's panels are designed to live on the sides of the screen, letting them get away with showing more tools (since the screen is wider then it is tall). It also makes sense to do this in KWord, since almost-all word documents will be written in portrait mode, not landscape mode: this layout allows you to see more tools and more of your document at the same time.
3. KOffice's panels can live separately from each other and separately from the whole window, if you desire. Or, they can all go in the side. If you need more panels then can fit on the screen, you can drag one into the other to create a tabbed panel. You can also easily get rid of panels completely.

Those are just a few...

awesome. i'd really love to see it implemented in common kde applications.

Doesn't Microsoft(R) have a patent on the Ribbon UI(TM)?

I'm also for something like this, but it has to be very different from the Microsoft(R) product in that case.

It would be strange to patent it since the tabbed-toolbars existed long before the ribbon UI (most html editors, borland delphi...).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_(computing)#Patent_protection
It's controversial to say the least

Reference 12 is a fun read

I think that kde and all other DE must not copy all the features of Microsoft Windows. Unfortunately Windows is the schema that dominate but KDE must to be more than little different. And Ribbons menus are a feature that for my opinion are not useful at all.

@fumantsu
Well, no one said that this ribbon-like interface will be incorporated in any of the current apps.

This is just a nice component made by wkai for those that want to use it.

I saw KOffice mentioned above. There are no intentions of making any of the KOffice applications (part from Kexi which has had the tabbed toolbars for some time now) use ribbon.

Although I strongly oppose ribbonization of any app that I use , this component could be used to develop a next-generation panel/dock for plasma. Unfortunately, I'm in too deep in other projects to start yet another one at this moment.