Preferences [Was: a whole lot of other things, too]

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Havoc Pennington">

> 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.

Okay, so, I might pipe up at this point.

Personally, I've found that the two preference dialogue launching interfaces
have confused the design choices here. We have the menus, and the folders.
Unfortunately, you can't seem get to the folders from the menus anymore, so
unless everyone has a Start Here icon on the desktop, they won't know about
it.

Anyway, this affects the design choices in that a folder interface needs to
be optimised for flatness, whilst a menu interface can be quite flexible
with categorisation. Having a bunch of folders in your preferences folder
makes life quite difficult (especially when they don't look like folders),
because you can't see everything at a glance. With menus, a short flick can
show all.

As it happens, I have a screenshot of the Mac OS X preferences program here:

  http://perkypants.org/screenshots/osx-prefs.jpg

It's optimised for at-a-glance grokkage of all the icons, but also their
categories, so wins over both positives of the the menu and folder
interfaces. The little bar up the top holds icons that you use regularly,
however I've never seen anyone drag their own icons up there before.

I dislike its inline display of preference panels though; they come up like
this:

  http://perkypants.org/screenshots/osx-desktop.jpg

I think that optimising for the menu interface is the best way to go for now
(and for 2.0), but it's something we'll have to look into again. The
nautilus view has the potential to be a lot clearer and more usable, but not
if it has a lot of folders for categories.

Maybe preferences:// should default to something similar to Jacob's filetype
categories view (that he used for his file selector) when implimented. Then
it would be much closer to the at-a-glance design of the OS X preferences
program, and still work with the menu interface.

- Jeff

-- 
   "She sped into the parking lot, the door flew open and there she was,    
   dressed only in a black bathing suit and sunglasses. I got in and she    
     reversed straight into another car. Classic Carine." - Stephen Gan