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

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 06:22:35PM +0100, Christian Neumair wrote:
> 
> 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

The current shell uses a custom canvas based layout that predates
GtkIconView

> 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.

This can be a serious problem for some <cough>german</cough>
languages that have loooong names.
 
> 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.

I find the matrix easier to use _iff_ the matrix is small.
How about a juxtaposition of the two idea.

A notebook with a matrix of set icons in one tab, and a list/tree of
'Other' on the 2nd page.