Re: Searching preferences?! [Was: switching to g-c-c shell?]

[Matthew Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On 8 Jul, 2005, at 12:40 PM, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> ...
> Don't you see searching for preferences as an astounding failure on 
> Apple's part (and others, who have done searching for preferences 
> before)?

For a single application, certainly (and I seem to recall rejecting 
such a suggestion for the Mozilla suite, though I can't find the bug 
report now). But for an OS, there are some preferences for which there 
is no good way to categorize them, so a search may be a faster way of 
finding them.

For example, (1) your choice of screensaver belongs in the same panel 
as (2) how long before the screensaver appears, which belongs in the 
same panel as (3) how long before the screen blanks, which belongs in 
the same panel as (4) how long before the computer goes to sleep. But 
(1) your choice of screensaver does not belong in the same panel as (4) 
how long before the computer goes to sleep; they're completely 
unrelated. There needs to be a split somewhere along that chain, and 
wherever you make the split will surprise some people who were 
expecting the things on either side of it to be in the same category. 
(Windows mitigates this with a button in the "Display Options" 
Screensaver tab that opens the "Power Options" control panel; but the 
Screensaver tab doesn't warn you when your current Power Options make 
the Screensaver settings inoperative. OS X does warn you when your 
Energy Saver settings make your Screensaver settings inoperative, but 
does so only in the Energy Saver panel, not in the Screensaver panel 
where you actually want to know.)

A more obvious example is accessibility preferences, because these are 
organized as a "why" (you want to set them *because* you have a 
disability), whereas the rest of the preferences are a "what" (you want 
to set *something* regardless of reason), so they're bound to 
intersect. Should key repeat delay go in keyboard preferences, or 
accessibility preferences? Should flashing the screen on alert sounds 
go in accessibility preferences, or sound preferences? Again, whatever 
you decide will not be the guess of a substantial chunk of people.

Searching may be an answer to this (especially in a Gnome-based OS, 
which has a wider range of hardware to cater for than Windows or OS X 
do, with some of it needing configuration because it's not 
ItJustWorks-compliant). However, if the problem can be solved by 
improving the number and presentation of categories to the point where 
scanning through them is quicker than searching, I agree it would be 
much better to do that instead.

--
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/