Re: REMINDER: GEP-2 discussion end date

[Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>]

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 16:03, Bill Haneman wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 20:42, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Having toplevel items called Background and Fonts is a major step
> > forward; if you decide to change your background, you look at
> > Preferences->Background. You want to organize things by thinking of
> > what someone is trying to do and what word they will then look for.
> > 
> > The old font setting in "Theme Selector" was impossible to find
> > and a major source of problems.
> > 
> > Havoc
> > 
> 
> Personally I think an "Appearance" toplevel from Preferences makes
> sense, if we were to do something like dobey suggests.  Otherwise I
> think  "Desktop Theme" (as in the previous incarnation of 'metathemer')
> is fine, but we have two problems:
> 
> * having multiple things called "Theme" can breed confusion;

That's why I intend to call it "Appearance" :)

> * I don't know a clean way to have both a general-purpose "Appearance"
> capplet _and_ "toplevels" (i.e. capplets) that occur underneath it.

You can make the appearance capplet open up the various tabs with
command line options which you can put in separate desktop files.

> er, what I mean is, an item in our menu structure is either a rollover
> menu or a node.
> 
> This suggests that we either have to make our "meta" appearance capplet
> a "sibling" of the other ones (confusing), or subsume the specific ones
> inside a single capplet (which it sounds like Havoc doesn't like).
> 
> Personally I would favor moving "Desktop Preferences" up a level in the
> foobar, maybe calling it "Settings" (since "Desktop" has been criticized
> for being confusing to users with Mac backgrounds).
> 
> >From there, two viable solutions occur to me at the moment:
> 
> 1. put "Desktop Theme Set", "Theme", "Fonts", "Background", etc. in an
> "Appearance" submenu; or
> 
> 2. subsume the above into a single "Appearance" capplet with multiple
> "tabs"; or

This is my plan.

> 3. do without the 'Appearance' grouping, i.e. leave the capplets as-is
> except for moving them up a level in the menus.
> 
> I think #3 leaves us with the problem that the appearance-related
> settings are mixed in with "mouse", "network proxy", "window focus",
> which makes them hard to find; this is likely to get worse as things are
> added to the menus in the future, so I would vote for either #1 or #2,
> with the move of "Desktop Preferences" up one level.
> 
> Also, two comments about this GEP:
> 
> * I have no objection to extending the discussion date, but am glad
> somebody is discussing it again :-)
> 
> * I think that this menus discussion, though important, belongs _after_
> we discuss, and hopefully reach consensus on, the requirements that
> we're trying to address (remembering that this is now a "requirements
> GEP" as requested by Michael).  
> 
> Of course the menus issue does have some bearing on our requirements,
> but I think we should agree on what those are first, before we starting
> putting labels on and boxes around things :-)
> 
> best regards,
> 
> Bill

Indeed.

-- 
Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>