Re: [Usability] New "Add to panel" dialog

[Diego Moya <turingt gmail com>]

On 21/10/05, Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert novell com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 22:33 +0200, Diego Moya wrote:
> > It doesn't work for the task of adding *several* new applets. It
> At least on the "old" dialog you can drag the stuff to your panel - it
> has the added bonus that you can put them precisely where you want them.
> I think this is a good alternative of leaving the window open - makes it
> easy for a seasoned l33t-hax0r to populate his/her panel quickly with
> the essential stuff, while not being annoying for the situations when
> you just want to add one thing.

Ok, the problem then was that it wasn't discoverable. I never thought
of drag'n'dropping as a possibility. The simple phrase "you can also
directly drag and drop items onto the panel" now added to the new
panel would have solved my problem years ago.

The "Cancel" button should definitely be renamed to "Close" - it
doesn't make sense adding several applets and then having to press
"Cancel" (which is false, since the changes are not canceled).

Multiple selection would also be a big bonus, it would make the same
multiple-adding function available without having to use drag'n'drop.


>
> > A solution for many items would be to maintain the current form and
> > provide a list of hyperlinks to the categories. The redundant indexing
> > of Search and this "Table of Contents" would support both possible
> > uses of browsing and looking for a specific item.
>
> I think this might be interesting approach. Although, I sort of fear we
> might be over-engineering this - we do not have THAT much stuff there,

Well, the question was wether this would scale to "a large set of applets" :-)


> It can just make stuff harder to find when there are five
> (albeit shorter) lists of applets to wade through instead of one :) "Hm,

It wouldn't be five short lists, it would be a long list with five
(exactly what is now) - but with an index at the top, just like a web
page with anchors to the different sections.


> it is organized in a nice list with big icons that are clear to see. If
> we do categories, lets just not make it too fine-grained - I fear a case
> where you are not sure of which category the applet would be in, and
> thus the whole category list would just add an extra step to decide
> where to look.

I agree, the catetories *shouldn't* replace the nice list of big icons
- it should stay as it is now, grouping the list by semantic
proximity. The ToC would provide anchors for quick access to the
middle and bottom of the list without scrolling, it wouldn't hide the
items into closed boxes *forcing* the user to make a selection, like
in the Windows and KDE control panels.