Re: Control Center

["James M. Cape" <jcape jcinteractive com>]

Daniel Burrows wrote:
> 
>   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 agree with that assessment. Copy the Netscape Prefs UI, it works, and
is the first well-done UI for a large set of preferences ever (much
better than both scrolling tabs and multiple rows of tabs).

    Jim Cape
    http://www.jcinteractive.com

    "All animals are equal, some animals
     are more equal than others."
         -- George Orwell, Animal Farm