Re: gnome-control-center 2.22 proposals

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

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).
> 
thanks for sending the mail, I was going to do it after the 2.20
release, so better to start ASAP. In fact, I am going to branch for 2.20
right after the release so that we can start working on new things right
away.

> 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
> 
I like them a lot, but as Sergey said, it's missing all the layout
options.

Also:
* what to do with Typing break? I think it could just be a preferences
dialog in the typing break itself (that is, no capplet for it), but then
we need a way to start it. We could either add a single check box to the
input devices capplet to enable / disable it, or just have it started by
default (but then, how to re-enable?)

* what do we do with keyboard shortcuts? Should it just continue on its
own?

* Network capplet. Not sure if this is redundant or not, it is for sure
on opensuse, where you have NetworkManager, but other distros don't use
it, so, what to do? If kept, we should think about adding more stuff to
it (like what there is in network-admin from gnome-system-tools) or just
rename it to Proxy, which sounds quite bad.

* libslab needs an API review as well as the removal of libbonobo usage.

* g-s-d improvements. We still call xrdb in 3 places, and other startup
fixes which should make it quicker.

* about-me needs a good redesign, so what about heading towards
about-me/online desktop integration? Also, should about-me help manage
accounts to be used by different apps? That is, it would be nice to have
a central way for mail, calendar, etc, etc accounts? Maybe this is too
long term, but it sounds like a good way to make about-me useful.
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>