Sub-tabs in capplets

[Denis Washington <dwashington gmx net>]

Hi,

Here is yet another post of me propagating sub-tabs for the capplets in  
control-center 2.20. But before you stop reading, let me explain.

First, one thing should be absolutely clear: I am a big fan of the 
simple notebook-based look of our current layout. It is pretty clean and 
you quickly find what you are looking for.

The problem is just that there a quite a few of these nicely simple 
capplets.

That's the reason why we need to and plan to merge some of these 
together to bigger, task-oriented preferences dialogs. A natural 
consequence of this is: more tabs per capplet. Naturally we won't just 
merge the existing dialogs and reorganize them instead, but even if we 
throw away all options that came from historical technical limitations, 
we still end up with more options per capplet.

I don't say that every capplet will have too many tabs after merging. 
But I think it is easily imaginable that there will be at least _some_ 
where this will be the case. And for those, really ->only<- for those, i 
propose to add a second level of organization.

Because I like the current notebook layout style as stated before, I 
propose to keep it as-is. Tabs that don't need sub-tabs should just look 
like now. Those who need them should contain them in avisually subtle 
way. Notebooks in notebooks don't really fullfill these requirements; 
they jump into the eye too much and also look a bit weird. So I propose 
to add a group of toggle buttons to the top of the content  of those 
tabs which need them. They can be separated from the actual content by a 
separator. The following link shows a mockup of this (it shows a dialog 
that combines the options of the "Keyboard" and "Keyboard Accessibility" 
capplets):

http://ultimum-projekt.de/mockups/keyboard.html

As I already said, I just want to add this kind of second-level 
organization if and ONLY IF REALLY NEEDED. It may be also be practical 
for certain situations in which tabs are very closely related (like 
"Layout" and "Layout Options"), but that's another story.

I hope I made clear why I want sub-tabs in the first place and hope you 
like the idea and the mockup. I'm really excited to see your comments! :)

Denis