Current Status of Control Center 3.0

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

Here is a quick summary of the current status of Control Center 3.0.
There is a lot of work to do if we are to provide a consistent and
appealing user experience in time for 3.0.


Shell
=====

A new shell has been added which supports embedded settings panels. It
has been migrated to use Gtk+ 3. It will launch settings applications
that are not available as embedded panels, but this behaviour is
probably undesirable as it creates an inconsistent interaction model.


libgnome-control-center
=======================

A new library has been added to make it possible to create embedded
Control Center settings panels. There are two classes available: CcPanel
and CcShell. CcPanel implements an embedded panel, while CcShell
provides access to the shell.

This library also includes the gconf-property-editor class, which is
used by many panels.


Migration to GSettings
======================

I am not aware of any work started to migrate to GSettings.


New Settings Panels
===================

Date and Time

A Date and Time service has been added to gnome-settings-daemon, and a
panel applet added to control center than can set the current timezone,
date and time.


Universal Access

A new "Universal Access" settings panel has been added which implements
most of the accessibility features that were previously scattered around
amongst other settings.


Backgrounds

A new Backgrounds capplet is under development (not yet committed),
which will replace the existing "Appearance" capplet. This follows on
from the discussions at the usability hackfest in London where it was
agreed that most of the features in "Appearance" were unnecessary (e.g.
multiple font options).


Removed Components
==================

About Me

About Me has been removed because it has not been converted to a
settings panel and has never been built by default. The result of the
earlier discussion was that the important functionality of About Me will
be replaced by other applications¹.


libwindow-settings

This has been removed following the discussion² that it is no longer
used.


Appearance

The appearance capplet has not been ported to a settings panel as the
functionality is expected to be replaced in other areas (see Backgrounds
above).


Summary
=======

There is a still a lot of work to do, especially if GSettings migration
is to be completed before 3.0. There is also plenty of other work to do
to present a consistent and complete set of settings (for example,
merging "Network Proxy" and "Network Connections"). There are a lot of
settings applications that are outside of the gnome-control-center
module that are not yet converted to be embedded panels.

Regards,

Thomas



¹ http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnomecc-list/2010-February/msg00023.html
² http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnomecc-list/2010-May/msg00024.html