[desktop-discuss] [indiana-discuss] Indiana desktop UI spec - 2nd draft

[Calum Benson]

On 17 Apr 2008, at 21:34, Frank Ludolph wrote:

>
> I suggest that many users, not just new ones, might be baffled by  
> this question since they might not be familiar with both  
> alternatives. This becomes a very *difficult* question if there  
> isn't an easy way to change the decision later.

Right; if we ever were to pose this question, I'd envision it being  
done in a very visually-oriented way, to give the user the best  
possible idea of what they were getting into.  Maybe even giving them  
the chance to 'try before they buy'.

> So I feel that the "Appearance" preference might need a "Layout"  
> tab. ;-)

:) As I mentioned before, I think this would actually be fairly  
trivial to implement *if* we were happy to throw away any panel  
customisations (with fair warning of course!) that the user had made  
in the meantime, and send them back to one of the presets.  It would  
probably even be fairly easy to make it somewhat 'undoable', by  
setting aside the user's current panel configuration for later  
reinstatement.  But trying to automatically and sensibly merge any  
customisations into one of the preset panel configurations would be  
nigh on impossible, I think.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems