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

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Thu, 2003-06-12 at 15:50, Andrew Sobala wrote:
> 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.

FWIW, I find the Ximian thing a lot more usable than the preferences
submenu. Part of this is that the icons are much larger and very
telling. I also found it simpler to remember a position of an item when
I can remember horizontal and vertical position. With the theme item for
example, I can remember "second row from above, somewhere on the right,
colored shirts" and this will make me find it in a split second, while I
always had some trouble finding this in the menu (which annoyed me
because I used this item a lot). I also find the logical grouping to be
very convenient (this makes the difference between "Keyboard" (Hardware)
and "Keyboard Layout" (Personal) or between "Menus" (Personal) and
"Menus & Toolbars" (Appearance) easier to understand than having both
listed below each other in a menu. Last but not least, I like that I can
keep the window open and it looks very friendly so as a user I feel
invited to look around there. It's not frightening or confusing at all,
_especially_ with such a low number of items (four categories with only
4-6 items each).

Daniel