Re: [Usability] [RFC] Announcing: Control-Center-GUI 0.1

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

Am Dienstag, den 08.02.2005, 04:07 +1100 schrieb Jeff Waugh:
> <quote who="Jody Goldberg">
> 
> > 2.10 will include an updated variant of the old ximian OSX style flat
> > layout.
> 
> I noticed that was changing, but it looks a bit... Wacky in the current
> tarball release. ;-)
> 
> > It does look ideal with the default arrangement of .desktop files.   Jeff,
> > Chrisian raises some reasonable points with his tab based design.  The OSX
> > style layout flounders badly when the number of capplets grows larger than
> > about 4 x 5.  Enforcing that limit requires a white-list or you end up
> > with windows style random capplet additions with every new application.  A
> > promising solution for the remainder is an 'Other' tab.
> 
> OS X has an 'Other' category, designed to fit the screen height, which works
> reasonably well:
> 
>   ----------------------
>   Category
>   [ ]  [ ]  [ ]  [ ] [ ]
>   ----------------------
>   Category
>   [ ]  [ ]
>   ----------------------
>   Other
>   [ ]  [ ]  [ ]
>   ----------------------
> 
> A tab for each category hides icons unnecessarily, requiring another click
> to even find out what's there, let alone click it. :-) Hard to feel like you
> have an overview of things when they're stacked up in piles (which is what a
> notebook is).

As Jody pointed out, the Apple layout doesn't work very well for many
items - and we HAVE many items. While about 20 in the default setup are
still OK, we have to deal with the fact that new items will be added. So
the Apple approach seems to be badly scalable.

Oh, just as a sidenote: We have very long names and descriptions for
each pref item. The current GtkIconView doesn't allow us to use
PangoLayouts, thus making it possible to chop or shorten text, which
results in uneven icon spacings. But will - once it can deal with
PangoLayout - crippled text ("Menus ... lbars") really help users to
identify a target they look for, or are icons meant to convey 90% of the
meaning of a capplet? Note that this might become problematic for 3rd
party capplets.

After all, I think the ListView approach seriously beats the icon
approach. Scanning a column (either text or pixbuf) just seems to be so
natural and reminds me of quickly reading a newspaper (one or two words
each row) if you're in a hurry, so that you can see at a glance whether
an article is interesting.

-- 
Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>