unity-design team mailing list archive

[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> Jo-Erlend Schinstad wrote on 06/07/11 17:45:
>>
>> On 6 July 2011 13:04, Omer Akram <om26er.list@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>...
>>> Good news, in Oneiric system settings will be removed from the
>>> SessionMenu and an icon for it will be placed in the launcher by
>>> default, It'll probably happen around alpha-3 I guess :-)
>>
>> That is not good news at all. The launcher is being abused. It should
>> not have a list of mounted devices and it should not have an icon for
>> system settings. Mounted devices should have an indicator and system
>> settings should have an icon in the dash. That is to say, it should
>> have its own lense.
>
> Even if the latter was true, it wouldn't unclutter the launcher at all,
> because every lens has its own launcher item.
>
>> With regard to mounted devices, I feel strongly that they should have
>> their own indicator for these reasons:
>>
>>     * Users don't understand why it's important to unmount them before
>> unplugging
>>           them, but they will do so by mistake and discover that it
>> does no harm. By
>>           using an indicator, we can use a green icon when the user
>> unmounts them
>>           correctly and a red one when they don't, leading them onto
>> the right path.
>>           Poeople do want to do the right thing.
>
> We have no evidence that a non-trivial proportion of people notice
> differently colored icons in the menu bar.
>
>>     * Placing mounted devices in the launcher makes the launcher
>> cluttered and
>>           people will not be bothered to search for them in order to
>> unmount, for
>>           instance when they're in a hurry or is under stress.
>
> I don't see how they'd be more likely to search for them in the menu bar.
>
>>     * The launcher should be for "apps". Trash, desktop and window
>> switching are
>>           valid exceptions, but it must not become a slippery slope.
>> The launcher is
>>           only effective when it only does what the user does often.
>> If it becomes
>>           filled with other stuff, then it will become less inviting.
>
> Personally, I would find more inviting a launcher that I could put
> anything into -- applications, bookmarks, documents, folders, contacts,
> whatever. I can do that with the Mac OS X Dock and (mostly) with the
> Windows 7 taskbar.
>
>> I feel that configurations should be placed in a lense with an icon in
>> the dash for
>> these reasons:
>>
>>     * Configuring and using are different things. So far we've only
>> had Preferences
>>           and Administration, but this has to change. We should reach
>> for a way to
>>           configure all applications from the same place. You will not
>> access Firefox'
>>           settings from Firefox' menus, but from TCS (The
>> Configuration Screen).
>
> iOS tried aggregating application settings into a separate configuration
> screen, and it didn't work. Example quote: "We received several emails a
> week from people asking for features that were already part of our
> application. We finally gave up and moved the settings into the
> application. We felt vindicated when we saw all the 5 star reviews about
> the amazing new features we added, all of which had been there in
> previous releases." <http://bjango.com/articles/settingsapp/>
>
>>           The settings will be available from GSettings and therefore
>> it is no longer
>>           necessary for each application to provide their own,
>> non-uniform, config
>>           dialogs. They will still be available, of course, but users
>> of Ubuntu will not
>>           have to search for them. They will just press the Ubuntu
>> button, tap or click
>>           Configure and select the application they want to configure.
>> Unity should
>>           provide a unified way of accessing all common features of
>> all applications.
>>           There is no unity without unification. This is quite
>> obviously the right way
>>           to do this, so we should prepare for it as soon as possible,
>> even though
>>           some applications won't be configurable that way -- yet.
>>...
>
> This is what Havoc Pennington called "the misguided 'hmm, maybe I can
> autogenerate my GUI' stage".
> <http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html> Artificial
> intelligence researchers work on many things, but I'm not aware of any
> who are working on the problem of making an auto-generated settings
> interface anywhere near as understandable as a human-designed one.

One project that is already sort of doing this is Wireshark.
Individual protocols (TCP, IP, etc.) register their settings with very
simple API calls along the lines of

register_boolean(&bool, "Name", "Description").

Wireshark does the rest behind the scenes.

The result is certainly usable, although probably not as usable as it
could be. They're located under Edit->Preferences->Protocols in
Wireshark if anyone actually wants to take a look.

Cheers,
Evan