unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Jan Claeys wrote on 07/10/10 00:50:
>
> Matthew Paul Thomas schreef op di 05-10-2010 om 14:08 [+0100]:
>>
>> If we discovered that most people expected to find the settings in
>> individual applications instead, [...]
> 
> That might be a learned trick after years of using a system that has
> no central place to change this sort of thing though.  I don't remember
> how this is done in Mac OS X?  And what would new users without
> experience expect?

Mac OS 8.5 through 9.1 had an "Internet" control panel (based on the
earlier bundled "Internet Config" utility) that had settings for default
browser, mail client, and newsreader (Usenet, not RSS), as well as other
Internet-related options like home page, plug-in and helper application
selection, e-mail notification, and proxy settings.
<http://support.apple.com/kb/TA25759>

This was a bit of an awkward split: for example, you could set your
preferred colors for Web pages (back when it was useful to do that) in
the Internet control panel, but to set your preferred fonts you had to
use the individual Web browser's preferences.

Mac OS X replaced it with a "Network" settings panel that covered only
connection and proxy settings, relying on individual applications to
provide their own interfaces for everything else.
<http://www.jmu.edu/computing/helpdesk/selfhelp/NetworkOSx/networkOsX.shtml>
Not all of them did so immediately: for a short but humiliating period,
the only way to set Mozilla as the default Web browser was to use
Internet Explorer's Preferences window.

Some people think the default application settings should have stayed
centralized. <http://www.tuaw.com/tag/misfox/>

>> (I don't understand what it means to have a preferred "Multimedia
>> Player" or "Terminal Emulator", though.) 
> 
> There are system-wide hotkeys to launch a "mediaplayer" (e.g. many
> recent keyboards have a special key for that) or a "terminal emulator".
>...

If that's all it is, probably it would be better in the Keyboard
Shortcuts settings. It's rather tedious to have an option there to set a
"Run a terminal" shortcut, and have an option somewhere completely
different to specify what "a terminal" actually means.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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