Proposal for KControl

[Aaron J. Seigo]

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On June 29, 2002 02:17, Charles Samuels wrote:
> A lot of users say stuff like "I'd like to make the taskbar show only the
> current desktop" -- and ask me to guide them through it.
>
> KControl, instead of being called "Control Center" should be "Configure..."
> (on the panel).
>
> And then, instead of group by category, you group by application, THEN you
> group by category.

what do you do about settings that are global to several applications?
will having multiple similarly named panels that do slightly different things 
(e.g. the icons panels) be any better? 

i don't know.

what i do know is:

 o there are more controls than necessary in the control center
 o there are more panels than necessary in the control center
 o not all of the controls are grouped logically together

something we started on the usability list was a catalogueing of every single 
option in the control center and what it does ... those doing this rather 
boring task got about 1/3rd of the way through, AFAIK.. the idea is to take 
this listing and regroup the panels from that list by grouping options that 
make sense together (both into panels and into tabs on the panels), 
eliminating options that are redundant or unecessary.

with that in hand you would then have a much better idea of what your 
configuration option groups look like and based on that you can start to 
create some better groupings

and then one can start coding the actual panels.
yes, it is a lot of work. but the panels are a bit of a mess right now. i 
don't know how much good another band-aide on it will do.

another concept is to drop the concept of one unififed control center. as you 
asked, what does "Information" have to do with a "control center"? perhaps a 
few purpose-built shells are needed for the various types of controls: look 
and feel, application settings (web browsing, etc), information.... this 
would result in less complexity in each of the apps and give a greater sense 
to the user what they were attempting to do. 

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" 
    - Albert Einstein
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