switching to g-c-c shell? [Was: Re: Control center and capplet merging]

[Carlos Garnacho <carlos_garnacho yahoo es>]

On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 14:11 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> Merging items could be useful. However, I don't think just shoving the
> same existing UI into multiple tabs in a single dialog will help really.
> It will just mean less things in the menu, and more confusion to users
> who are looking for things that are no longer there.
> 
> See gnome-control-center. This is in gnome upstream now. However, it is
> totally hidden. :-/

Seems a bit annoying for me too, in fact, I've been working during 2.11
to get gnome-control-center in shape, by adding better/faster layout
functions, RTL support and accessibility support (all of this is now in
CVS [1]), now I'd like to propose it as the default way to access
preferences.

Some may think that it could encourage people to add more capplets, but
that's already happening, in the last 2 releases we've added "Multimedia
systems selector", "Remote desktop" and "Removable drives and media", so
we should at least find a way for not punishing users because we don't
follow our own rules :) (HIG says that when there are more than 15
elements in a menu, better think in displaying information in other way)

So here's my vote to get rid of that horrid submenu :)

	Regards

[1] might look like this:
http://www.gnome.org/~carlosg/stuff/control-center/g-c-c.png


> 
> -- dobey
> 
> On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 09:14 -0400, Eric Larson wrote:
> > On the usability front, I am not sure it is best to merge tools. While
> > it does make some sense it could also be more confusing to the user
> > because it forces the user to deal with fonts when they only want to
> > change the theme. I think the larger issue is not how many system/admin
> > tools there are but rather how they are organized. This is a subtle
> > difference but I think it makes some sense. BTW, I am using debian
> > unstable if anyone would like to know what I am seeing. 
> > 
> > The Desktop menu on the panel has a huge amount of options which are
> > organized into one long list. It seems things could be better by having
> > an actual control panel that could help to organize different areas
> > better. Something in nautilus where the view shows a title and break
> > before showing icons specific to that group could be helpful in
> > organizing the mass of preferences while keeping each individual
> > interface clean and simple. Although, I am a bit bias, Ximian desktop
> > does this. It needs work of course because it is pretty out of date, but
> > if we consider things like windows users and mac users, a control panel
> > type window that shows preferences in an organized fashion may be very
> > usable. 
> > 
> > This is Just my two cents of course :) I am not sure of the current
> > scope or context of this problme so I apologize in advanced if it is not
> > relevant. 
> > 
> > Eric
> 
> 
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