Re: Control center refresh

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 14 Jul 2009, at 21:12, Thomas Wood wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 17:15 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> > Some folks at Sun (not including me, really) have been working up  
> > some
> > ideas for a control center shell refresh.  If I'd been more organised
> > I'd have liked to give a lightning talk or something about it in Gran
> > Canaria last week, but have done the next best thing instead-- I've
> > just blogged about it :)
> >
> > <http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/2009/07/14/control-center-refresh/>
>
> Well, this is excellent, I've been thinking about something like this
> for some time, wish I'd heard about it sooner!
>
> Not sure about the rollover/in place menu, how well does this scale?

Well, that partly depends on how the capplets end up being distributed  
among the top level categories, I guess, but it's certainly a  
potential concern.  That said, the idea of a more compact control  
center isn't to give carte-blanche to developers to implement a whole  
bunch of new capplets just because there's now more room for them :)   
We'd still want to keep a tight rein on that, as we've been trying to  
do in recent years.

(I'm still pinging the designers to join in the discussion here and/or  
on the blog, as they'll have thought about these sorts of issues a lot  
more than I have...)

> How is Sun planning on implementing this?

No firm plans there as yet, so hopefully in whatever way works best  
for the community, if people want to go down this route-- the more  
people we can persuade to help out, the better :)  There's literally  
no source code at all yet, just those Flash demos, so we're certainly  
looking for input on how you'd want us to proceed with any development.

As I mentioned over on d-d-l, it's probably also worth mentioning that  
part of Sun's motivation for working on the control center at all is  
to integrate with the Visual Panels work[1] that we're also doing,  
which will probably largely replace gnome-system-tools on the  
OpenSolaris desktop over time.

While it's not immediately obvious that Visual Panels have a useful  
life outside of OpenSolaris, by all means have a look at what we're  
doing there too, and if there's anything that might be useful upstream  
we'd be happy to figure out how to make that happen, too.

Cheeri,
Calum.

[1] http://opensolaris.org/os/project/vpanels/

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems