Control Center

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows brown edu>]

  I've posted about this to the list before, but no-one seems to have listened..

  In my opinion, the Gnome Control Center's UI is pretty good, but the business
of having capplets appear in a notebook doesn't make sense to me and seems to
unnecessarily complicate the GUI.  I understand that capplets continue running,
but conceptually the control center seems to be a tree of option groups.  The
fact that the "Ok" and "Cancel" buttons apply to each individual capplet is
particularly confusing, most people (at least, Windows refugees) will likely
expect those to apply to the whole dialogue.  I propose one of the following
changes:

  (a) keep the current set of buttons but open each capplet in its own toplevel
  window.  This seems to be how they act now, and would make the structure
  much clearer.  However, you then lose the unity of the tree structure on
  the left.  My preference is:
  (b) Make the entire thing act as a single dialog.  Keep "Try" and "Revert"
  for each individual capplet (possibly changed to "Try Page" and "Revert Page")
  but move the Ok and Cancel to a separate box from everything else and a
  central location.  ie:

    +-------+------------------------+
    |       |                        |
    |       |                        |
    | tree  |        capplet         |
    |       |                        |
    |       | TRY  REVERT       HELP |
    |       |                        |
    +-------+------------------------+
    |        OK        CANCEL        |
    +--------------------------------+

    It might possibly also be a good idea to remove the menubar, but I'm not
  sure about that.

  I may try tweaking the control-center to act this way on my own time at
some point in the future, but probably the maintainers would do a better job
of it than me.  Besides, this could be a stupid suggestion, in which case I
want to know. :-)

  Oh, and what's going on with the project to set up a UI policy for
menus, buttons, etc?

-- 
  Daniel Burrows

"I think that the surest sign that there is intelligent
 life out there is that none of it has tried to contact us."

  -- _Calvin and Hobbes_, Bill Watterson

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