Improving the Layout of KControl modules (was: Re Gnome ....)

Tue Apr 23 23:56:32 BST 2002

For KDE 2.2 I already posted some suggestions to give a cleaner and 
easier to understand layout to the kcontrol-modules.

This time I went through all the modules and created a list of improvements 
which gets rid of a huge number of control-widgets while still preserving 
the same amount of functionality.
I'd like to kindly ask the maintainers of these modules to take care of these 
issues. If you aren't able to take care of this please drop me a line and 
I'll try to find someone else to make those changes.
As discussed in the "Re: Gnome Article on UI Design on /." thread it turned 
out that "ease of configuration" can be even more important than developing
new features. 

KControl issues
=============

File Browsing
=============

File Manager
------------

Behaviour:

'Show file tips' and 'Number of filetip entries' should go into a
single group box 'file tips'

Previews:

The protocol-stuff probably isn't limited to Konqueror, right?
Therefore it should be moved into an own module
'File Browsing' -> 'File Previews' -> Tab:'Protocols'

Using the same type of widget that is used for "Show Previews for"
would look much more clean!

Look & Feel
===========

Desktop
-------

'Show Previews for' should go into an own module
'File Browsing' -> 'File Previews' -> Tab:'General'
The listview would be extended to have two checkboxes for each
item: one for Konqueror and one for KDesktop and it would have
to be renamed to 'Preferred Previews'.

Instead of having multiple choices in Konqueror 'View' ->
'Preview' -> 'images, ...' one would only be able to enable
or disable those previews selected in this dialog. If you
haven't noticed it yet: Switching between 'Enabling all
the preferred previews' and 'Disabling them' is a real
pain right now. This solution would solve this issue.

Fonts
-----
"[x] use Antialiasing for fonts" should be replaced by a Combobox
which looks like this:

Use Antialiasing on [Common Monitor]
for Fonts larger than [8] pt

The Combobox [Common Monitor] would have alternative states
[None] and [LCD Monitor] (i.e. it uses Sub pixel hinting).

On the other hand one would get rid of the whole antialias tab
in the Font Installer module (Antialiasing doesn't have
something to do with the _Font Installer_ anyways.
This solution gets rid of THREE redundant control-elements that we have right 
now :-)
And it is much more userfriendly (No normal user knows about "Subpixel 
hinting")

The "Configuration file" - item would also move from Font Installer to here.

Panel
-----

Look & Feel:

A group Box "Tiles" should be created which contains a
listview featuring the items:

K-Menu
Application Launcher
QuickBrowser
Legacy Application
Desktop Access
Window List

Below one would have _one_ "Browse" button to choose any
possible pixmap on the System for each of the items above
and a Preview area next to it.
(This way it would look and work consistent with
kcmwallpapers and kcmcolors e.g.).

We'd get rid of a huge number of controls this way. :-)

Menus:

Instead of the current items and Widgets in "K Menu Layout"
one would have a single listview in which all the items
appear. Each item would have its own checkbox.

That would also look and behave much more simple and it
would get rid of all the redundant widgets.

Network
=======

Talk Configuration:
------------------
I already posted a lot of possible measures to improve this
dialog last year. Unfortunately the guy who created this module
didn't care. Just ask me if you want to improve this dialog and
I'll explain again.

Peripherals
===========

Keyboard
--------

From a User's POV I feel that the "Options" tab looks very much
"Advanced" to me (Never heard of "Switching policies" and "Xkb" ;-).
The current "Advanced" tab looks rather like
basic options to me So maybe the content of those two tabs
should be switched?

Mouse:
-----
The items in the Advanced tab should be Grouped this way:

GroupBox: Pointer

Acceleration
Threshold

GroupBox: Drag & Drop
Start Time
Start Distance

"Double Click Interval" and "Mouse Wheel Scrolls By" remain
without GroupBox.

Gnome 2 has a nice additional tab to change the Cursor Theme -
Maybe somebody wants to implement this, too? See:

http://ercansoy.virtualave.net/images/mouse.png

Personalization
===============

Accessibility
-------------
Gnome 2 has also got a nice accessibility dialog. We already
have something quite similar but as you can see we could do
a little fine tuning ;-)

http://ercansoy.virtualave.net/images/acess.png

Power Control
==============

Battery Monitor, Laptop Power Control, Low Battery Critical and
Low Battery Warning should go into tabs of one single Module.

System
======

Font Installer
--------------

I already wrote about this one on kde-core-devel today. The section 
"L&F" -> "Fonts" also suggests how to get rid of the Antialiasing-tab 
which is rather misplaced here as it rather deals with the actual "look" 
than with installing fonts.

Konqueror Browser
-----------------

HTML:
Introduce a groupbox "Links" in which one will find 
"Change cursor over links" and "Underline Links"

Introduce a GroupBox "Images" in which one will find
"Automatically download images" and "Animations"

User Agent
----------

Any idea how we could put the "Add..." checkboxes into a less
prominent place?

-- 
Dipl.-Phys. Torsten Rahn 
<tackat at suse.de>   <tackat at kde.org>   <tackat at tackat.org>

KDE - Conquer Your Desktop!
http://www.kde.org