Re: gnome-control-center 2.22 proposals

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Sat, 2007-09-15 at 19:31 +0200, Denis Washington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> With GNOME 2.20 being in hard code freeze now, I believe it may be time
> to think about what could be done for gnome-control-center 2.20. In my
> opinion, we should continue the merging work started for 2.20 (in form
> of the "Appearance" capplet).
> 
> To start the discussion, here is a proposal from me: the "Mouse",
> "Keyboard" and "Keyboard Accesibility" capplets should be replaced by an
> "Input Devices" capplet (which incorporates all features of the
> mentioned dialogs except for keyboard layout management) and a new
> "Localization" capplet (which, in addition to providing the keyboard
> layout options, enables the user to choose it's language and locale).
> 
> I created mockups for both proposed preferences dialogs. They can be
> found here:
> 
> http://ultimum-projekt.de/mockups/input.html
> http://ultimum-projekt.de/mockups/i18n.html

(Sorry, coming to this party a bit late...)

Great start.  There seem to be quite a few features missing from your
Input Devices mockup that are in the current Keyboard Accessibility
capplet, though, where are they moving to?  E.g. import settings,
disable if unused for N seconds, beep when AccessX features turned on or
off from keyboard, to name but a few).  A GUI is required for at least
some of these to meet a new Free Standards Group keyboard a11y spec
that's due to be pushed out soon, I believe.

Also worth pointing out that both MacOS X and Windows keep the keyboard
(and other) accessibility options together in a separate capplet, and
IIRC the a11y team were originally quite keen that this was the case for
GNOME too.  So you'd certainly need to run this sort of change past
them, if you haven't already.

As an aside, I'm not that keen on the term "Input Devices"-- couldn't we
just call it "Mouse and Keyboard" like MacOS X (and Windows, except it
still has separate capplets for each), which are more familiar terms to
more people?

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems