[Nautilus-list] Re: Installation-time performerance

[Christian Meyer <chrisime uni de>]

Hi all,

this looks great. I'll refer to Kai's Photo Soap now. At the moment, 
GNOME has way too many options to choose from the panel. When you right 
click on the panel a bunch of items appear. When I was using GNOME for 
the first time I was quite shocked and left the context menu alone.
The same thing applies to the current gnome-control center (yeah, I 
know, a new version is on the way). I'm glad we have a usability project 
now which faces those issues.
I think it has been already discussed but we need to put all 
configurations of the panel into control center (options for the panel 
are spread, ATM, and this sucks!). Also, other options needs to be 
there. Have you guys recently looked at KDE's control center. I don't 
want to say that it is the most perfect piece of software in the 
universe, but compared to GNOME's it's quite cool. Just look at it...
If I have some time left I'll create a ToDo/Issue/Whatever list for 
GNOME. I've noticed many bad things over the last few months which 
haven't been improved, yet.

Regards,
Christian Meyer

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Coincidentally was re-reading Joel Spolsky's book and he has strong
> words for wizards that ask questions unrelated to whatever the user is
> up to:
>
>  http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$61
>
> Conclusion: we should ask about all the default desktop settings stuff
> if we think the user is planning to configure their desktop on first
> login - i.e. if desktop configuration is the task they have in
> mind. After getting Ximian I'd believe they probably are planning on
> that; so the wizard is good. After installing Red Hat, I really doubt
> the desktop per se is the main reason they bought the OS, it's just a
> means to run apps and tools. So it may well be totally valid for Red
> Hat and Ximian (these are just two examples) to differ on whether
> there's a doorman wizard - i.e. maybe we both made the right UI
> decision for our users.
>
> Of course that leaves the question, what the heck does upstream GNOME
> do by default. ;-)
>
> Random other thing Joel argues is that the Netscape/Nautilus/etc. way
> of setting up the options dialog is not so good, he suggests a
> notebook instead:
>
>  http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$71
>
> But then in the printed copy of his book (this point is not in the
> above-linked online edition), he says that we'd have to redesign the
> notebook widget in order to nicely support as many tabs as Nautilus
> has in its list-on-the-side. He suggests how to do this in the book.
>
> The printed copy of the book also presents a way to keep the Outlook
> shortcut bar from sucking. His mockup looks like a pretty good idea.
>
> Havoc