Re: Control Center

[sml13 cornell edu]

This may be veering off topic a little bit, but to any of y'all at 
RedHat:  linuxconf (which is written in gtk, right?) suffers from this 
same poor design.  A new tab is generated for every tree item you select 
and pretty soon the left side of the contol center window is an absolute 
mess (in it's "current" (Redhat 5.2) state it expands the window for 
every new tab that is added; so if you select half a dozen or so 
configuration options from the tree -- a perfectly reasonable scenario for 
an administrator doing some heavy duty configuration -- your window is 
wider than all three of your virtual desktops :-).  I think Dan is 
definitely on to something here.  The "useability" of this design could 
definitely use some improvement (I'm wimping out and posting this as a 
"user/beta-tester/focus-group-member" and not a "coder" :-).

shane

On Sun, 13 Dec 1998, Daniel Burrows wrote:

>   I've posted about this to the list before, but no-one seems to have liste=
> ned..
> 
>   In my opinion, the Gnome Control Center's UI is pretty good, but the busi=
> ness
> of having capplets appear in a notebook doesn't make sense to me and seems =
> to
> unnecessarily complicate the GUI.  I understand that capplets continue runn=
> ing,
> but conceptually the control center seems to be a tree of option groups.  T=
> he
> fact that the "Ok" and "Cancel" buttons apply to each individual capplet is
> particularly confusing, most people (at least, Windows refugees) will likely
> expect those to apply to the whole dialogue.  I propose one of the following
> changes:
> 
>   (a) keep the current set of buttons but open each capplet in its own topl=
> evel
>   window.  This seems to be how they act now, and would make the structure
>   much clearer.  However, you then lose the unity of the tree structure on
>   the left.  My preference is:
>   (b) Make the entire thing act as a single dialog.  Keep "Try" and "Revert"
>   for each individual capplet (possibly changed to "Try Page" and "Revert P=
> age")
>   but move the Ok and Cancel to a separate box from everything else and a
>   central location.  ie:
> 
>     +-------+------------------------+
>     |       |                        |
>     |       |                        |
>     | tree  |        capplet         |
>     |       |                        |
>     |       | TRY  REVERT       HELP |
>     |       |                        |
>     +-------+------------------------+
>     |        OK        CANCEL        |
>     +--------------------------------+
> 
>     It might possibly also be a good idea to remove the menubar, but I'm not
>   sure about that.
> 
>   I may try tweaking the control-center to act this way on my own time at
> some point in the future, but probably the maintainers would do a better job
> of it than me.  Besides, this could be a stupid suggestion, in which case I
> want to know. :-)
> 
>   Oh, and what's going on with the project to set up a UI policy for
> menus, buttons, etc?
> 
> --=20
>   Daniel Burrows
> 
> "I think that the surest sign that there is intelligent
>  life out there is that none of it has tried to contact us."
> 
>   -- _Calvin and Hobbes_, Bill Watterson
>