Re: some more questions on the control center shell, etc

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 17:43 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> Calum Benson wrote:

> > Of course if we'd tackled that problem first, we might not have needed
> > to switch back to a shell at all :/
> 
> Change back? I thought people had agreed that in the long run the menus 
> were not a good idea, and that a usable shell was much nicer?

There didn't appear to me to be any overwhelming consensus in the recent
desktop-devel discussion, but admittedly I was probably reading it
through menu-tinted spectacles :)

> The current shell is not perfect and it still has issues that need to be 
> ironed out, but I don't think that any blocker issues cannot be resolved 
> before release. Are we suggesting that even if we had a perfect shell, 
> it would still not be more usable and accessible as using a menu?

Well, I find it hard to believe it's more efficient, for the cases where
a) you want to change one thing, and b) you know the name of the capplet
that you want to change it in... which I'm sure is the majority of
cases, once the user has done their initial desktop setup and has
accordingly gained a little experience of which capplet does what.  It's
generally easier (and in this case requires fewer clicks and
window-opening delays) for people to pick from a single alphabetical
list, than to play guess-the-category, scan in two dimensions, and/or
have to start typing something to narrow down the options.

As I've said before, I always use the menus rather than the shell on
both OS X and Windows when I'm using those, so yes, I'm biased in that
sense.  All I can say is that I did audibly mutter an expletive when I
had to open the control center shell on Ubuntu for the third time in two
minutes the other night, rather than pick straight off the menu, and
it's a very long time since a GNOME UI feature made me do that :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems