Re: CDDB-Capplet [was Re: magicdev [was Re: Gnome-vfs blocks cddb-capplet. Why?]]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com> writes: 
> I think this is a fine idea.  One capplet[2] for CD's/DVD's makes sense.
> It does make me wonder, though, if 'hardware' related capplets[2] should
> be put together.  We currently have Mouse, Keyboard, CD, and potentially
> palm.  To that, we may add a Camera and a Scanner capplet[2].  Do we
> want to put a 'Hardware' entry in Start Here?

My guess is users looking for mouse, keyboard, CD would have much
better luck finding Preferences->Mouse Preferences->Keyboard than
Hardware->Mouse. You'd have to do a user test but it seems pretty
likely to me. I don't see splitting it until we run out of slots in
the toplevel at least.

If we get too many I'd almost rather see the capplets contextually
available in some way (e.g. CD capplet available when viewing a CD in
file manager, from CD player app; or the Camera capplet appears when
you plug in your camera; or Scanner capplet available in Gimp) instead
of creating a lot of menu clutter. In addition to that, we have tabs
within a single capplet, and the Windows-like button inside a capplet
that pops up another capplet, as alternative places-that-are-not-menus
to put stuff.

The simple fact is, the menus do not scale much past what's currently
in them. Menus with > 15 items (probably > 10, I'm just making up
numbers, but 20 is clearly a disaster) are hopeless, menus deeper than
one submenu are also pretty much awful. Mac UI guidelines
categorically forbid depth past one submenu and that makes sense to
me. So you can have this:

Applications -> 1
                2
                ...
                15   ->   1
                          2
                          ...
                          15          

Assuming made-up number 15, we have a max of 225 menu slots. That's
assuming the categorization distributes evenly (i.e. there are 15
things per category). Plus 15 may well be an overestimate.

On Advogato Maciej accuses me of following rules blindly, ;-) I don't
intend this as some hard-and-fast rule, I just intend to say that
deeply nested menus and menus with 30 items in them clearly suck, and
a single Preferences menu with a reasonable number of clearly named
control panels is clearly a big win. So I very much hope we can keep
that and not end up with the GNOME 1.x 31 capplets situation again.

I'm sure the UI guys have better suggestions than I do, I'm flailing
around with rough guidelines and just a sense that we need to keep the
simple menus, but I don't necessarily have the best ideas on how to do
that.

Anyhow to get off this dead horse, iain I do agree CD Properties makes
sense in the menus for now, as long as there are plans to fix it
up. It's not like the other capplets are perfect. ;-)

Havoc