Re: UI Mockup for Gnome 3.XX "Share" section of System Settings

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi Sebastien!

On 12/01/2010 12:33 PM, Gendre Sebastien wrote:
> I don't know if it's good, but I have make a UI mockup for the Share
> section of System Settings for Gnome 3.XX.
>
> It's just a first idea and it probably need more work.
>
> Link to mockup: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636206
>
> Link to "System Settings" design wiki for Gnome 3.XX:
> http://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings
>
> What do you think?

I'm no UX expert, and I'd really like to get the take of an Allan Day, 
mpt, the Calums or Andreas on the details, but I do have some comments 
on the mock-up (which are similar to some of the comments Wouter had in 
Bugzilla):

I *really* like that sharing files & browsing other people's file shares 
is just integrated into Nautilus - that's where it should be, for the 
most part, and not in system settings. I also like that the interface 
for sharing is right click->Share this folder, and the interface for 
finding other shares on the intranet is "Network places" in Nautilus. 
SMB is a de facto standard now.

For anything which (a) requires manual sharing because it's a 
non-default protocol or (b) requires manual mounting, it also seems like 
Nautilus is the best place for this to happen. I'm not sure exactly what 
a good interface for creating a CIFS or NFS share might be, but I think 
the interface for SparkleShare, Ubuntu One or Dropbox is pretty good for 
cloud storage (that is, a special folder where we share things, with an 
online interface for handling ACLs for contacts)

Once you take that away, the system file sharing sessions come down to: 
"Allow users to share folders" and "Allow users to view other people's 
shares" (as security options, presumably) - and I would argue that both 
of those are unnecessary & should be yes by default. I do like your idea 
of having conditional sharing enabled, but I am not sure what the UI 
should look like (how do you define "Home", for example? I know how it 
might be implemented (wifi ESSID, I guess) but how would you expose that 
to the user?).

Then there's bluetooth file sharing, which I don't see in your mock-up. 
And this is an opportunity, I think, to do better than everyone else - I 
have yet to see a nice UI for transfering files over Bluetooth (Mac OS X 
comes closest).

For DAAP, I'd expect that to be in the music player. Although there's an 
argument for all music players to share the settings...

I would expect the "share this printer" option to be in printer 
configuration, not sharing configuration.

As Wouter said, Zeroconf really isn't something to expose to the user - 
a checkbox along the lines of "Automatically search for shares on the 
local network" covers the only option you'll need for that. It should be 
possible to turn off, and should be on by default. I don't think there's 
much else to say about that.

(I'm copying the comments to Bugzilla, but since you started this 
discussion here...)

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org
Jabber: nearyd gmail com