Re: gnome-control-center 2.22 proposals

[Denis Washington <dwashington gmx net>]

On Mon, 2007-10-01 at 18:22 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> 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.

I weren't aware of that. I left out "import settings" because I saw not
much of a reason to enable the import of settings here while this
feature doesn't exist for any other kind of settings, and I really don't
know why it should be there. But it could certainly be re-added.
> 
> 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.

In the case of re-adding the features I left out, keeping the keyboard
accessibility capplet separate would probably be better because
everything wouldn't fit that well into a single tab, though I would like
having one capplet less here.

> 
> 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?

Depends on whether we may want to add preferences for other kinds of input devices there, like touchpads, drawing tablet or even joysitcks/gamepads.

Cheers,
Denis