Re: System Settings Overview Design

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2011-10-24 at 12:57 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to come up with a plan for the system settings overview.
> We've got a bunch of bugs about it (although [1] is the main one) and
> I've had a couple of discussions with Bastien recently, but we still
> don't seem to have a way forward.
> 
> There are some visual tweaks to the settings overview that I think
> would help, but the basic problem is the dimensions of the icon grid.
> This has become too high due to the item grouping (into personal,
> hardware and system), and it also leaves large gaps where there are
> only one or two items in a row.
> 
> One obstacle to addressing the layout problem is the changing number
> of panels. This grew in the last release and is likely to grow again
> in future releases. The settings overview needs to be able to
> accommodate this growth.
> 
> I've also heard it discussed that we're not going to show some
> hardware panels if they're not needed, such as the graphics tablet
> panel. Can I ask what the plan is there?

The plan would be to hide hardware based panels where the hardware isn't
readily available. For example, we would hide the Wacom panel if no
Wacom tablets were plugged in and none were configured via Bluetooth.

We would still show those hidden panels in the search results, as a way
of discovering the settings, if needed.

> Considering the somewhat dynamic situation, the best options right now
> seem to be to either change from a grid layout to a list [1] or to use
> a fluid grid layout that can accommodate changing numbers of panels.
> The only other option I can think of would be to keep a much closer
> eye on the number of panels that are included and to manually update
> the overview layout to match (potentially having multiple layouts for
> different kinds of devices).

We now have _all_ the panels that would show in the System Settings
under one module, inside gnome-control-center. That should make it
easier to keep track of them, and merge/unmerge specific settings as
needed.

Cheers