Re: [HIG] prefs dialog recommendation

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Fri, 2002-09-27 at 08:56, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We really need to get this in the HIG - I hear Evolution 1.2 has Yet
> Another sort of prefs dialog, using outlook shortcut bar on the left
> and multiple tabs on the right. There's too much innovation in this
> area. ;-)

I'm not sure we need another HIG release to address that, insomuch as
Evolution isn't following what's laid out in the HIG anyway (which
denotes use of tabs for preference dialogues). I feel very ill disposed
toward the outlook/evolution style sidebars, which I personally think
Ximian is blindly following because "Outlook does it". The benefits of
having a (woo hoo) infinitely extensible list of launchers is just
silly... its no longer a shortcut bar when it needs to be infinitely
extensible anyway, especially given how difficult the demned things are
to scroll. 

In addition (and perhaps more importantly) it doesn't provide the nice
visual metaphor that tabs provide. Other than mild association through
being "to the left" of the object it controls, there's really no
association displayed to the user between the state of the shortcut bar
and the state of the thing it changes.

Looking through Evo (haven't looked at 1.2, but extrapolating from 1.0)
this screams that they have too many "preferences", and they're
seriously over-organizing them. One important thing they could change is
to give up trying to make evolution a single application that "does
everything". Its great to have tight integration between the calendar,
mail client, address book, etc, but I see no particular reason to make
them the same application (and hence, e.g. have the same preference
pages). This causes much silliness in Evolution (1.0, at least) such as
the check mail toolbar button goes away when you switch into a "folder"
that doesn't store mail, and weird things like that.

-Seth