Re: Control center and capplet merging

[Eric Larson <elarson ximian com>]

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 It needs work of course because it is pretty out of date, but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

On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 11:09 +0200, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> Hi Diego,
> 
> Op Sun, 26 Jun 2005 00:37:14 +0200, schreef Diego Gonzalez:
> 
> > I have read the wiki page ( http://live.gnome.org/PreferencesRevisited )
> 
> > http://www.es.gnome.org/~diego/app.html .
> 
> Great work, Diego.
> 
> The font capplet UI itself should get a ui-review too, but that one's
> pretty hairy I'm afraid.
> 
> > If maintainers and usability experts think this is appropiate I can
> > continue merging capplets as suggested in the wiki page. I won't do the
> > ones that imply merging a capplet with a dialog from gnome-system-tools,
> > as we are too close to the deadline, for that work it might be better to
> > wait until Carlos has liboobs in shape.
> 
> I don't know what liboobs is, but you did remind me of the fact that the
> GNOME i18n applet still hasn't been integrated. Does anyone know the
> status of that? Can we get it in for 2.12?
> 
> regards,
>