Re: Control-center styles

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

I've nearly completed a widget which can be used for instant-apply windows.
These are not dialogs. When the settings apply instantly, what you have is
another view of the object to which they apply.

Screenshots of the design are available.

The design applied to a workspace settings notebook:

  http://www.phys.lsu.edu/students/merchan/shots/workspace-settings/

The same design, but with a disclosure button for advanced settings:

  http://www.phys.lsu.edu/students/merchan/shots/2001_12_24_041825_shot.jpg
    (The "More Evil!" label is a joke from IRC.)

and last a test of the widget with nothing set:

  http://www.phys.lsu.edu/students/merchan/shots/2001_12_26_182025_shot.jpg
    (er, before I made an override of the class->show function.)

Placing buttons at the bottom of the window is not an option. This would
make them look too much like dialogs and when placed there they would
change location dramatically when an advanced group of settings is displayed.

The buttons are thusfar unlabelled, but this could be changed. The idea
is to make these standard across all GNOME programs. The buttons are on the
page. They apply only to the page being viewed. The icons are known to
be unclear, but they are learnable - especially if standard - and the buttons
have tooltips. The buttons are:

  Help - Displays help (via the help system) for the particular page.

  Undo - Undoes any changes made since the window was made available to
        the user. This means that after the user closes the window, via
        the window manager control, the undo history is discarded.
        Iconifying, shading, or obscuring by any means does not count.

  Remove Customization - This restores the system defaults and should only
        be present when defaults exist. If the settings are unchanged from
        the defaults, this button would be insensitive. If the user has
        changed the settings and closed the window, then when it is shown
        again this button would be sensitive and if clicked would be made
        insensitive as the Undo button is made senstive; thus allowing the
        user to compare easily his settings to the system defaults.

        This icon is the most problematic. At least for English speakers,
        there is the additional mnemonic of "out of the box settings".
        I can find no stock icon, and can think of no new icon that would
        better indicate this. Since the factory settings are not too
        important a feature, I'm willing to make the trade-off to conserve
        space and provide a better looking view than would be possible if
        label were provided. The tooltip is still present, so the feature
        is not opaque. If it is standard across the platform, that should
        compensate.

Things not shown, or incorrectly shown:

  F1     is bound to Help.
  Ctrl+Z is bound to Undo.

  Notebook pages should not have access keys (mnemonics).

  The advanced settings disclosure button should have an access key.

Applied to mouse and keyboard settings, this would appear as:
  A window titled something like "Input Devices - Settings".
    (I think that may too obscure a name.)
  A notebook with two pages, labelled "Keyboard" and "Mouse".
  And then the approriate controls for each.

  The "Mouse" label should be changed to describe the user's primary
  pointer if this can be detected. 

  Additional pages should be added if additional input devices exist.


For now this is just a widget and mostly static. In a perfect world,
pages could be added by some sort of component model as the option groups
exist and the widget would adjust at some limits to keep a sane UI.
(e.g., 1 page: no tab, 2-6 pages, tabbed, >6 pages: a side listing
  and a beating for the person who made it so.) The individual programmers
would write pages, or make a container to select appropriate pages from
the system for whatever object. . . . But more on that later, perhaps.

The names I've been using are GtkSettingsPage and GtkSettingsView
(the container for pages), but those are probably inappropriate,
especially given that there exists a GtkSettings API; suggestions are
greatly desired.


On Thu, Dec 27, 2001 at 03:37:31AM -0500, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Hi Bradford,
> 
> We really need to decide on what we want the ex-capplets to look like.
> The more I look at it, the more I think instant-apply is really the way
> to go.  I would like to change the mouse-properties capplet back to
> this, as well as the keyboard capplet.  I think going to a [Help]
> [Close] set of buttons is probably easiest at this point.
> 
> In addition, I'd like to put as many of our schemas in libgnome as
> possible.  Can we deprecate gnome-control-center/schemas except for
> 'meta' schemas?
> 
> I'd like to clean up the gnome-properties-keyboard this week.  Any
> objections to me committing something new there?
> 
> Thanks,
> -Jonathan


Cheers,
Greg Merchan