Re: Preferences, System Tools

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 11:36, Jody Goldberg wrote:

> >       * Which printer and printer options such as paper
> >         (may additionally have presence in print dialogs) 
> Yes and no.  I see this in more of an 'Your environment' type
> setting rather than hardware.

There is the act of configuring the locally attached printer for classic
tools like lpr and such.  That will be important for years to come. 
Misconfiguration here could also potentially (a.k.a. theoretically)
cause severe problems.


> > Network
> >       * Select a wireless network (essid)
> >       * Configure and sign on to VPN
> >       * Set network proxy
> > Notes: all cards should dhcp automatically if there's a link. Also, we
> > should introduce a "home or work" profile setting; but network profiles
> > are *not* a matter of setting up two network configurations, rather
> > they're a matter of associating other settings (such as Evolution
> > settings) *with* the network you're on. Which network your on should be,
> > for the most part, automatically inferred.
> Selecting which printer to make default would be nice at this level,
> as part of the current environment/profile.

Agreed.  Or even further, not just which printer is the default, but
which are valid at all.  If we're all using Zeroconf (with or without
multicast DNS) or some other service discovery protocol, this may be
moot, but I don't think my printer at home should even be selectable
when I've got my laptop attached to the network at my place of
employment.

> > "What to use?"
> Do we want a tool to configure mime handlers or just assume it is
> part of nautilus ?

Web browsers are also a huge "consumer" of MIME handlers.

> 
> >       * Web browser
> good.  distinct http vs https vs ftp handlers seem ugly in the ui.

FTP is often a very different use case than HTTP.  It's true that in
many cases FTP is just used to anonymously grab a file just like HTTP,
but in many cases users want to do rile file management on FTP.  Don't
know if that's really that important (you could just explicitly ask to
use Nautilus on servers you need to log into and do file management),
but it's something to think about.

> >       * CD player
> >       * DVD player
> >       * CD burner
> - Distinct cd and dvd players ?

Classic music vs movie player argument.  ;-)  I'd like to see either
Rhyhtmbox (with CD playing) or a nice small simple fast CD player (like
we have now) start up for audio CDs and DVDs, but Totem or some other
actual movie player for CD and DVD video discs.

And I should note the difference there.  There *are* DVD audio discs
that should be opened with a "CD player" (bad name for the app...
perhaps s/gnome-cd/gnome-audio-disc/) and there are VCDs that need to be
opened in Totem or the like.  The UI should make it clear that we're not
talking CDs/DVDs, but instead audio discs vs video discs.

 "Audio Disc (CD):  [Audio Disc Player]"
 "Video Disc (DVD): [Totem Video Player]"

Might be a reasonable UI, since (as this conversation shows) many users
think in terms of all audio discs being CDs and all videos being DVDs. 
Also of note, I usually hear people refer to DVDs as CDs.  Rather
complicated.
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.