Advanced Options in the Accounts KCM

[David Edmundson]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Lasath Fernando <kde at lasath.org> wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
> This is really my first time writing to the Mailing List, so bear with
> me if I say the wrong things ;)
>
> The reason I'm writing is because of the way advanced options are
> displayed in the Accounts KCM. Once the Advanced button is clicked on
> the edit accounts dialogue, it promptly opens *another* dialogue with
> the advancedOptionsWidget. Personally, I think this is unintuitive,
> and inefficient as this dialogue not only obscures the basic options,
> but it also means the user has to press two buttons to apply their
> changes.
>
> And being the new kid on the block who doesn't know how the streets
> work, I straight away got started on implementing something better. I
> was inspired by how emapthy managed to handle this gracefully, and
> came up with something similar (using a Flat QPushButton).
>
> Normally, the advanced options are still hidden and out of the way. (I
> also thought the old button looked out of place there).
> http://local.lasath.org/settings_normal.png
>
> When the user clicks it, the advanced options are shown within the same
> dialoge:
> http://local.lasath.org/settings_advanced.png
>
> The only problem I could see so far was with the Jabber plugin:
> http://local.lasath.org/settings_advanced_jabber.png
> Its advancedOptionsWidget is rather large, and causes the dialogue to
> expand quite a bit.
>
> Anyway, David Edmundson kindly informed me a little while ago that
> since this is a significant change, I should consult the mailing list
> first.
>
>
I may as well be the first to reply too.

My main argument for turning it into the current system (with the dialog) is
that advanced options should get out the way, because hardly anyone ever
needs to change them. (if lots of people do need to change it, it shouldn't
be under advanced). Personally I don't think anyone will need to click the
advanced button except hard-core nutters who want to break their accounts,
so I don't really care about the dialog.

However, I think your suggestion still meets my requirements, so I'm happy
with it being changed.

You've listed what's good about the system, I'll list some bad points, so we
can try and address them:

In the 'edit account' view, there will be a massive whitespace under the
existing set of options which will only be used when you click on advanced.
 - conversely you have made use of the large amount of white space on the
'new account' dialog, so it's no worse.

This has the potential for resizing dialogs. Especially with XMPP, if we
showed pictures of that in the edit view and after advanced is clicked,
either we have whitespace or resizing dialogs. Neither of which are cool.
 - maybe we could avoid this by splitting settings across more tabs. (or a
scrollview?)

Whilst I've seen parts of the page that expand out when you click a button
on the web, I've never seen it anywhere before on the KDE desktop, putting
in too many of our own custom interfaces isn't good.

Dave
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-telepathy/attachments/20110216/5a7958bc/attachment.htm