Colourful titlebar is now grey

[Tcaws]

You seem to have got rid of the colourful titlebars (red, green, yellow) that were present, even in the last Beta. They are still showing in the User interface menu, but they are just grey in practice.

(That's a real disappointment, of the "stay on previous version to not lose that feature" variety)

[SuperTech]

Thank you for your honest feedback, and I'm sorry to hear that the new on-demand interface is disappointing for you. We understand that design changes can be difficult.

In the current ribbon interface, only the name of the active ribbon is colored as per the new design.

We know that preferences vary—some users prefer this new look, others the older one, and some favor the menu interface only. While it's a matter of personal choice, this update is part of our ongoing effort to improve the experience for the majority of our users. We appreciate you sharing your perspective as it helps us shape future decisions.

[SuperTech]

Good News! We're pleased to announce that a new colored theme will be introduced for SoftMaker Office NX/2026 for Linux in the next beta release.

[Woody44]

We know that preferences vary—some users prefer this new look, others the older one, and some favor the menu interface only. While it's a matter of personal choice, this update is part of our ongoing effort to improve the experience for the majority of our users. We appreciate you sharing your perspective as it helps us shape future decisions.

Here's a general thought as feedback to your development team:

Those people (and companies and governmental entities) who purchase your software are end users. We don't buy it to tinker with bells and whistles, we buy it to GET ... THINGS ... DONE. We learn how to do the things we need to get done with the software we have. When a new version of the software comes along, it's wonderful if it introduces some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious new feature that 99 percent of users will never EVER want or need ... as long as you leave the stuff that we use alone so we can continue to GET ... THINGS ... DONE.

When you tinker with the interface ... that interrupts work. It looks different. That's distracting, and distraction interferes with productivity.

Reality check: "Different" does not equal "better." A perfect example is the menu interface. Essentially from the first appearance of graphical user interfaces, most software programs went along very nicely with what we now think of as a "classic" menu bar across the top of the screen. Somebody came up with that interface, and many people were paid significant amounts of money to develop it and to improve it. It worked (and still works), and millions of people around the world somehow managed to GET ... THINGS ... DONE using it.

And then, in 2007, Microsoft came out with Office 2007 and the ribbon menu structure. I was working in a municipal agency when the town "upgraded" from Office 2003 to Office 2007. Work came to a virtual standstill, because nobody knew how to do any of the things they had been doing quite satisfactorily for years or even decades.

To the designers on your development team, a little thing like the color of a menu bar, a toolbar, or a program title bar may seem like a trivial detail, so they see nothing wrong with changing it in the holy name of being "new" and "edgy." But to the end user, it's not trivial. We are accustomed to seeing what we see. When we open up a new version on Monday and it's different ... the brain disengages. It sees "different," and it immediately stops to ask, "Did I make a mistake? Am in the right program? What's going on here?"

Advice from a long-time end user and former beta tester for multiple software companies: DO NOT change things for the sake of changing them. This is not an argument in favor of stagnation. By all means, introduce new features when and where appropriate, BUT ... have some respect for your established users. DO NOT just change things for no reason other than to make them different. We don't want different. We want the same. We want to be able to keep using our software productively, not waste time figuring out what's new and different about every new version.

I still use the classic menus in SoftMaker Office. I dearly wish you would offer a classic menu option in FlexiPDF -- it needs one. At my most recent job for a public (municipal) agency, the town used Microsoft Office 2019. Fortunately, it is a small municipality and the IT team were reasonable people. I asked then if they would install Ubitmenu menu for me, and they did so. Ubitmenu is a German (I think) add-on for Microsoft Office that restores the classic menu structure. Having that available to me was the only way I was able to get any work done. IT took the unusual (for IT people) attitude that if it would make me more productive, they would let me use it.

This should be a mantra for software developers: "Different does not equal better." If there isn't an urgent need to change something -- DON'T.

[SuperTech]

Thank you for the detailed feedback and advice.