Two weeks later: KDE 3.4 Control Center UI Review

[George Staikos]

On Sunday 27 February 2005 05:05, Anders Lund wrote:
> 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.

  I could easily do this, but then I would be arguing against another group of 
people.  Can't win with these decisions.  And really, given that we have so 
many major bugs in KDE 
( http://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_severity=critical&bug_severity=grave&bug_severity=major&order=bugs.bug_severity ) 
I think time is better spent elsewhere than pushing pixels.

> 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

  I agree, that would be very bad.

> 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'?

  I have thought of this.  No time or desire to do it right now though.

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/