Re: Feature request: Preferences, animation & speed settings

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 08:44 +0100, Ross Smith wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Could I make a request for some kind of nice GUI to set animation
> speed preferences, possibly with an eye towards being able to choose
> type of animation in the long term.
> 
> I love the way compiz allows you to tweak everything easily with ccsm,
> which to my untrained eye looks like a modular design, so it's very
> easy for it to manage any setting they add.

gnome-shell will obviously be more configurable in the future than it is
now, since now it's not configurable at all. :-)

But adding a preference is generally speaking something we do in GNOME
as the last resort. For a detailed discussion of the cost of adding
preference, see:

 http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html

In this case, if we immediately add a preference for the speed of the
animation, then we've solved a problem for the small group of users that
are annoyed, that can figure out why they are annoyed, and sufficiently
annoyed to go track down the preference to change it. But we've left
everybody else out.

So, maybe the timings are just too slow in general (they are, but not
sure if speeding them up completely resolves the problem). Maybe the
timings should speed up as you gain familiarity with the shell. Maybe we
can actually detect the tolerance for speed of the user by watching how
fast they mouse and how fast they double click.

And then when every other option is exhausted, we can go back and see if
adding a small number of preferences is the right way to do it. There's
no way we'd want to add separate preferences for the speed of going to
the overlay and the speed of switching desktops, but maybe a single
"animation speed" slider that we derive everything else from would be
appropriate.

- Owen