Re: merging applets

[Darren Kenny <Darren Kenny Sun COM>]

Hi Rodrigo,

Sounds like a good start ;)

Some comments below, to throw some fuel into the flames...

Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> Hi
>
> Since we didn't come to any conclusion at GUADEC, let's discuss it
> there.
>
> So, most people seem to agree on having less capplets, since the
> Preferences menu is too crowded, and there is lots of confusion for the
> users (like 3 keyboard applets).
>
> So, here is the list of current capplets and my initial proposal for
> merging them:
>
> * about-me

How widely is this information used at the moment? Seems like it could/should be 
more widely used to provide defaults for the filling in of fields when creating 
accounts in apps like Gaim, Ekiga, Evolution, etc. But I guess that's another story.

> * at-properties
> * a11y keyboard, keyboard and keybindings: merge them in one single
> Keyboard capplet

Sounds good to me, but see my comments below w.r.t. an Input Devices capplet....

> * background, display, font, mouse?, theme switcher, ui-properties,
When you say display above - do you mean Screen Resolution?

Would it more more sense to link keyboard and mouse into "Input Devices" - 
leaving it open for non-mouse devices like wacom tablets, etc?

> windows: merge them into a single 'Display' capplet
> * default apps

Is there any intention of making this more extendible by allowing the easy 
addition of possible handlers by ISVs - from my understanding at the moment this 
 requires that the gnome-default-applications.xml file needs modification 
directly - it would make more sense (to me) if this was achieved through a merge 
of several xml files, or something similar...

Also, would it be possible to extend the list of apps that a user might want to 
be able to express an interest in? e.g. Multimedia player - maybe it makes sense 
to link this with the file-types and mime-types as below (afterall isn't this 
what we're looking to do - decide what is the default application for a given 
mime-type / url or similar?)

> * file types, mime-type

See above.

> * localization

What is this? I've not seen it before...

> * network, url-properties

What is url-properties? Is this referring to the proxy for the given url type 
(http/https/ftp, etc?)

> * sound: add video device setup and call it Multimedia??

This makes a lot of sense to me. One concern is the possible confusion between 
Multimedia and the handling/playing of it - is this mime-type or default app, etc?

> so, let's the discussion begin


And so it does ;)

Thanks,

Darren.