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

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

Hi Anna,

Just so you're aware, this is pretty much what I am doing, though I
disagree with you some on specifics. I don't have a lot of time right
now, but I'll try to type up a summary of the "master plan" in the next
couple of days.

Just to address a couple points...

1) There should be no Applications->Applications menu. The items in this
menu (which is now called "Other" to clarify its tenuous state of
existence) were poorly filed GNOME 1.4 items. We should probably go
through and get releases of GNOME 1.x applications that include the
necessary keywords to put them in smarter places.

2) I think the connection to the GNOME 1.4 menus is actually fairly
strong, but even if it weren't, now is the right time to get rid of
bad-crufty things like this lest we have to live with them eternally. It
only gets harder. I'm not inclined to increase the similarity to the
GNOME 1.4 menus at the cost of having a good structure.

3) KDE needs such a control-center monstrosity because they have Waaaay
too many preferences and categories. We have about 15 preference pages,
each of which is fairly small, most of which do not have tabs. With the
current number of preference pages I would say categorization of the
GNOME preferences is almost unnecessary. I plan to do some
categorization anyway, because I expect the number of items to grow.

My current thinking is something like

Appearance
          ->Background
          ->Font
          ->Theme (don't like this name, but its the word du jour)
          ->Toolbars & Menus
Desktop
          ->File Manager
          ->File types
          ->Keyboard Shortcuts
          ->Panel
Hardware (or "Devices" or perhaps something else, need to think)
          ->Camera
          ->Joystick
          ->Keyboard
          ->Mouse
          ->Printer
          ->Scanner
          ->Sound
Personal  ->Accesibility
          ->Language
          ->User Information (not the right phrase)

The rule of thumb is that none of these should require administrator
priviledges, and none of them should be "dangerous" or possible to get
wrong. System *settings* would be under:

System Tools->System Settings
or
System Tools->Administration
or something like that.

> Finding settings all over the place in my menus led me to wonder why, if
> all the other systems I investigated provided a centralized place for
> these settings, Gnome2 should be different. Taking the sets of

The reason for not merging these two is based on what I believe GNOME's
realistic target audience to be. I think most GNOME users will either be
savvy enough to look for the word Administration, or they will be users
working on machines they do not administer. To make GNOME safe and
friendly for these "administered" users I want to make sure that
everything in the preferences menu is for them. There's nothing you are
locked out of, and there's nothing dangerous. They are preferences not
settings.

To do this for much of the hardware stuff is probably going to require
some low-level coordination, but it should be possible. We're kidding
ourselves if we think we're in exactly the same market as WinXP and
MacOS/X, so I think we're going to see some different design choices
popping up based on that. (this pushes another button of mine, which is
we *desperately* need to figure out / decide who we are designing for,
but I'll resist going off on this tangent)

I don't *want* to have something like the KDE control center. Both
MacOS/X's and GNOME2's preference systems are much more sane. WinXP's
task based approach is interesting, particularly since I'm hoping to
introduce more of a task-based GNOME in the future. On the other hand,
I'm worried that WinXP's system is fairly nebulous and has no strong
navigation concept.

I should also mention that I think ideally the hardware menu would adapt
to only show items that you actually have on your system.

I think System Tools needs subcategories to keep it under control. I
need to run a system that has distro menus merged into GNOME2, its very
negligent of me that I haven't been, but some possible categories would
be:

System Tools->Administration
System Tools->Server Settings
System Tools->System Settings

whatever...

Gotta run. More later.

-Seth

On Fri, 2002-04-26 at 16:07, Anna Marie Dirks wrote:
> On the subject of preferences (and in turn, of menus), I have done quite
> a bit of research and have arrived at a proposal for reordering the
> Gnome2 preferences/settings and menus. 
> 
> To begin with, please turn your attention to the following spreadsheet,
> which compares the organization of preferences and settings in several
> different systems, including KDE, Windows XP, and OSX. 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/comparison.gnumeric
>      
> I did this comparison to see what terms and groupings other systems are
> using-- which provides a) a picture of what people new to gnome will be
> familiar with, and b) a set of different groupings to borrow from. 
> 
> To give you with a more concrete sense of how these are organized, I
> have screenshots of each system in the directories below: 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/windowsxp/
> 
>     (Note that they allow their users the option of using a task-based
>     approach.) 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/kde/
>     
>     (The screenshots in the "controlcenter" subdirectory are meant to
>     demonstrate the sheer power and friendliness of the three different
>     control center tabs (Index, Search, Help). Ah, to have something
>     that useful. 
> 
>     The screenshots in the "preferences" subdirectory detail the
>     organization of each of the preference submenus.) 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/macosx/
> 
>     (This is a reprint of Jeff's screenshot from earlier this week, put
>     in a handy-dandy place.) 
> 
> Then, to remind you of where we are coming from, I have some screenshots
> of the gnome1.4 menus (both from a standard Debian installation and also
> a set of ximian-ized menus). 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/gnome14/
> 
> So. What is the problem with the current Gnome2 menus and preferences?
> 
>         1. As Havoc pointed out in an earlier message in this thread,
>            they are too many levels deep (ie, more than two). 
>         2. They bear almost no resemblance to the gnome1.4 menus (making
>            upgrading a PITA). I am not saying they should be identical,
>            but trying to retain some of the good things about the
>            gnome1.4 menus would make the new ones easier to learn to
>            use.
>         3. Some of them contain entirely too many items. For instance,
>            look at my *35 item long* system tools menu: 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/system-tools.png
> 
> Items highlighted in yellow are settings/controls and don't belong in
> that menu, items highlighted in blue are either duplicates of other
> items, or are deprecated. Both of these groups should be removed from
> this menu. 
> 
> The applications menu suffers from a similar problem: 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/applications-applications.png
> 
> Again, items in yellow are settings which don't belong in this menu. 
> 
> Finding settings all over the place in my menus led me to wonder why, if
> all the other systems I investigated provided a centralized place for
> these settings, Gnome2 should be different. Taking the sets of
> settings/controls from these two menus, and the list of preferences from
> the "desktop preferences" menu, I set out to organize them with the
> following goals in mind. 
> 
> Preferences/Settings should be organized into groups which:
> 
>         1. Are not more than two levels deep 
>         2. Do not contain more than 10 menu items 
>         3. Use terminology which is common between the systems I
>            investigated (including gnome 1.4) 
> 
> This turned out to be pretty easy, so I looked at all of the stuff left
> in my menus, and ordered it too, using the same criteria. Therefore, 
> finally, below is my proposal for how the gnome2 menus, and settings
> should be organized.
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~gnome2menus/my-proposal.gnumeric
> 
> Please review it, and let me know what you think. If there is some
> interest in this approach (and if it isn't way too horribly late for
> such a change), then I would be happy to keep working on it, in the form 
> of usability tests or a patch. 
> 
> Thanks, 
> Anna
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list