Re: control-center 2.13.90 released

["Thomas Wood" <thos gnome org>]

I was thinking of doing some work on the theme manager UI for 2.16. Should
the theme manager be switched to explicit apply too? It often takes more
than a second to apply a theme.

Maybe the problem here is that the preview isn't good enough to
demonstrate the change in settings before they are applied. The background
options of both Windows and OS X have a little box to show what the screen
will look like before the setting is applied. This way the user feels
confident about how the new setting will look, before it is applied. With
the current explicit apply it is difficult to know how your new background
will look, unless you realise the image in the selection list actually
alters to show what the background will look like.

-Thomas

On 31 Jan 2006, at 6:13 am, Elijah Newren wrote:

> On 1/30/06, Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com> wrote:
>> On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 13:54 -0700, Elijah Newren wrote:
>>> It's worth noting that the only applicable reason from that page for
not making it instant apply is that it took longer than a second. It's
worth noting that several have commented in
>>> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=327335 saying that we  should
>>> look at making it faster, since it's close to a second (and for
several people is faster than a second) anyway.  For those of us for
whom it is faster than a second, this change is a HIG violation
AFAICT.
>> No, read my mail to announce the changes to the appropriate lists.  Both
>> reasons are valid. All of the settings in the dialog get applied at  the
>> same time as well. So, the HIG still suggests it should be explicit
apply, even if it is fast for you.
> Could you explain the reasoning?  I've read your announcement (you're
referring to the one to gnome-doc-list and gnome-i18n list, right? I'm
not aware of any other) and the HIG page and things don't seem to jive:
>> From your announcement:
> 'The changing of one's background takes 1.4 seconds on average, with
Nautilus managing the background, and all of the settings need to be
applied at the same time, which means that the dialog meets both
exceptions as stated in the "Instant apply windows" section.'
> vs the HIG:
> 'Do not make the user press an OK or Apply button to make the changes
happen, unless either:
>  *  the change will take more than about one second to apply, in which
> case applying the change immediately could make the system feel slow or
unresponsive, or
>  * the changes in the window have to be applied simultaneously to
> prevent the system entering a potentially unstable state. For example,
the hostname and proxy fields in a network properties window.'
> I can understand the timing one (though that just sounds like a bug that
needs to be fixed; it was fast before as Pat points out), but I don't
remotely see how the background preferences settings can be put into an
inconsistent/unstable state with instant apply.  I could just be missing
something obvious, though.