Re: Ungnomifying the control center



Rodrigo Moya wrote on 31/10/08 10:48:
> 
> On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 14:04 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
>...
>> Cool.  Is the "we" Sun?  I think a lot of us have the same desire.
>> Would be good to work together on this.  Matthew has already started
>> putting up some ideas and research:
>> http://live.gnome.org/SystemSettings
>...
> as for the UI, the problems in libslab (used by the current g-c-c shell)
> is speed and some dependencies (bonobo) that should be removed. The UI
> design got a lot of usability testing during its development, so unless
> you want to try something totally different, the libslab UI is the way
> to go IMO. From that we could do some more usability tests and try
> fixing the problems found. So I hope you're not starting from scratch.
>...

As I wrote on the wiki page, the basic interaction problem with the
g-c-c shell is that "it is slower to use, especially for people who have
become accustomed to the 'Preferences' and 'Administration' menus: they
need to wait for the launcher window to open before separately launching
the appropriate settings window, and they need to close it separately
when they finish."

KDE, Mac OS, and (partly) Windows Vista solve this -- and I think Gnome
should solve this too -- by presenting modules/panes/panels directly
inside the main window. That way, opening a particular group of settings
doesn't increase the number of things you need to close afterward. And a
cross-reference (e.g. Screen Saver -> Power Management) doesn't increase
the number of things you need to close afterward either.

Doing this well would require, in turn, defining a standard size (or at
least a standard width) for all panels. Otherwise one of two things
would happen: (1) large panels would scroll nastily inside a small
window (as they do in KDE), or (2) the window would alarmingly resize
itself in both directions as you moved from one panel to another.

Another architectural change is for each panel to provide a search index
including synonyms, and to respond appropriately to being launched from
a search result. For example, if I type "bigger text" into the search
field, the "Appearance" panel should be offered as a result even though
it doesn't use either of those words anywhere, because "text" is in its
search index. If I then select that result, the Appearance panel should
open -- not to the Theme tab as normal, but to the Fonts tab.

Cheers
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/


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