Two weeks later: KDE 3.4 Control Center UI Review

[Anders Lund]

On Sunday 27 February 2005 05:57, George Staikos wrote:
> On Saturday 26 February 2005 12:31, Anders Lund wrote:
> > On Saturday 26 February 2005 18:03, George Staikos wrote:
> > > I wish we had a multi-level tabbar though.
> >
> > You are kidding, right? Multilevel tabbar is about the worst GUI element
> > you can come up with. A tabbar with more than 2 or 3 tabs means you
> > should reconsider what you are doing.
>
>   And create 3-4 modules instead?  You think there doesn't exist something
> that has > 2-3 distinct panels?

As you may know I'm in favor of having many options, so it is not that I don't 
see the problems with presenting options to the user in a nice way.

That said, I do believe that a deeper or larger tree of modules is easier to 
use than multilevel tabs. I know that a lot of people are scared about the 
tree, but I'm not one, I think trees are fine for navigation. Putting a 
search/filter entry like the one present in more and more places will add to 
ease of use, as would (in the case of kcontrol and similar) enhancing the 
search for single options.

Other options include using sub dialogs for advanced options.

The older way of handling tab bars with many tabs (hiding some of them behind 
error buttons, not squeezing the text, still used in kcontrol) is MUCH better 
than multi level, despite the fact that you have to scroll it to see all its 
offerings. It's faster to find the desired tab than in a multilevel tabbar, 
and less frustrating because the level of frustration is directily 
proportional with the number of tabs (contrary to raising for each tab you 
activate because things move around with multilevel tabbars).

A potentially devastating problem with multilevel tabs is that once you have 
it , someone could think of (or not think of) putting tree or five rows of 
tabs in one widget. And that is unbearable, believe me, I have tried both 
configuration dialogs and applications (a text editor) like that under 
windows, and it's horror. As far as applications I can choose, but multilevel 
tabwidgtes in kcontrol would be unavoidable, and thus make me consider not 
using KDE, seriously (hey, what a horrible tread :o).

In the specific case of the Crypto module, its help text

    "This module allows you to configure SSL for use with most KDE
    applications, as well as manage your personal certificates and 
    the known certificate authorities."

splits its tasks into two groups using 'as well as' as the separator. So maybe 
that module could be split into 'Certificate Manager' and 'SSL'?

-anders

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