RE: [Setup-tool-hackers] RE: 2.4: System Tools - Please try them

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

On Thu, 2003-06-12 at 13:01, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-06-12 at 07:52, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> 
> > I've seen this in MacOS X and I never saw the point personally. How is it
> > easier to use them if they are icons on one big window than if they are
> > icons in a hierarchical menu? Also, doesn't this just encourage us to have
> > lots of little control panels because we can categorise them, instead of
> > having fewer sensible control panels?
> 
> Yeah, I always find the categorised MacOS control panel hard to use. 
> More often than not I know the name of the capplet I want to run, but
> because things aren't organised alphabetically I have to hunt around for
> it rather than homing in straight away.  (Luckily MacOSX gives you the
> option of just listing them all alphabetically too).
> 
> Funnily enough, XP gives you the option of having all the control panels
> listed on an alphabetically-ordered Start->Control Panel menu, so you
> never have to open XP's control panel at all... sound familiar? :)

Ah, that's interesting. I've always found capplets ordered by
functionality (like OS X) easier to find; it's always made more sense to
have "Fonts" and "Theme" next to each other and separate from "Mouse",
"Keyboard" for example.

Maybe we can't go down here without proper usability testing.

Murray: I don't think it encourages us to have too many control panels,
because we're actively trying to keep the number at a minimum. But if
you look at vendor GNOME - RH is a good example - there are already too
many capplets (even vanilla GNOME has too many capplets, really) for a
menu IMHO.

-- 
Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>

"We made GNOME-VFS support smb: and nfs: URIs. And we made OOo support
GNOME-VFS. Booyakasha!" -- nat