Re: Capplet organization

[Jens Granseuer <jensgr gmx net>]

On 13.03.2007 08:37, Denis Washington wrote:
> I also like the the icon bar organization from KDE land, described in 
> the draft of the KDE 4 interface guidelines:
> 
> http://wiki.openusability.org/guidelines/index.php/Practical_Examples:Configuration_Dialogs

I wouldn't mind such a look, myself, but I think it's worth
considering that this looks a lot like what the control-center
looked like in earlier versions (don't remember if it was early
2.x or even 1.4).

If you follow this line of thinking further, there isn't much
reason for having capplets as standalone apps. You could just as
well list them all in one such bar and embed the actual controls
in the control center "shell".

It would be interesting and helpful to know what the reasons
were back then to move away from organizing everything in such
an integrated control panel, and using individual capplets. I
suspect part of it was the large number of pages, but I'm not
sure if having a multitude of separate capplets is better.

Now, having gotten rid of my fundamental critique, I think the
icon bar layout you pointed out does not work very well for a
very small number of pages, which we'd be looking at when only
talking about a single (albeit merged) capplet (e.g. keyboard).

Or, in other words, no, I don't have any great ideas, either.

Jens