Re: [Usability] Control Center Appearance Capplet

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Apr 19, 2007, at 4:53 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> On Apr 17, 2007, at 1:57 AM, Thomas Wood wrote:
> ...
> > http://live.gnome.org/ControlCenter/AppearanceSettings
> ...
> > The themes tab provides a way of saving and apply a particular group 
> > of appearance settings.
> ...
> > This means it will change the settings on other tabs, and this is 
> > contrary to advice in the HIG. However, I am not sure if the advice 
> > in the HIG applies to this, as it is (or should be) fairly obvious 
> > that changing to a different theme will affect options not shown on 
> > the current tab.
> ...
> One way to fix the tab problem would be to follow the general layout 
> of the "Network Settings" window: have an option menu listing the 
> themes, centered above the set of tabs. The biggest drawback of this 
> approach would be that there would be nowhere for the theme previews 
> to go.
>
> Another approach would be to have a narrow vertical list of themes 
> with previews (each theme name under its preview) down the left, with 
> the tabs for adjusting the current theme (or auto-creating a custom 
> theme, if you started tweaking one of the presets) on the right. (If 
> you were determined to allow multiple custom themes, the bottom of the 
> theme list could have [+][-] buttons for adding/removing them.)
> ...

A third approach would be to have a "theme" consist only of those 
settings in the "Appearance" tab, not the settings in any other tab. 
For example, it seems very unlikely that you'd want to change font 
rendering per-theme, and it makes more sense for the font choices 
themselves to be placed together with the font rendering controls than 
for the font choices to be theme-dependent. (It's also not really 
useful for font choices to be theme-dependent as long as Gnome 
distributions have a dearth of GUI-quality fonts, and that situation is 
unlikely to improve soon.)

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