Re: [RFC] Announcing: Control-Center-GUI 0.1

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 13:22:06 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Planning to be "scalable" here is exactly the wrong thing to do. The
> person using the UI is not scalable. We should just assume there is a
> hardcoded limit of 15-20 items; and fix any and all reasons there are
> more.

With my "boring backwards compatibility guy" hat on, in future I'd like to
integrate Wine such that Win32 control panel applets appear in the closest
equivalent to the control panel in the native desktop. 

That does not mean I think it should be designed to deal with an unbounded
number of applets. Havoc makes some great points about UI design. However,
assuming the GNOME project can control everything and preventing/making it
harder for developers to put extra applets there will:

a) Hurt Windows compatibility, at least in the UI sense
b) Cause people to put config related non-app stuff in the applications
   menu instead.

eg the Sun JVM puts a Java config thingy in the "Preferences" menu today.
Yes it sucks and is broken and users don't want to configure Java, but
I don't see Sun stopping anytime soon  and I'd rather
have it in Preferences than in some totally random unrelated place.

So by all means make it look best with a small number of applets, but
please don't take away the ability to put new stuff there in a sane
fashion ...

thanks -mike