Control center refresh

[Calum Benson]

Some folks at Sun (not including me, really) have been working up some  
ideas for a control center shell refresh.  If I'd been more organised  
I'd have liked to give a lightning talk or something about it in Gran  
Canaria last week, but have done the next best thing instead-- I've  
just blogged about it :)

<http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/2009/07/14/control-center-refresh/>

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson@...            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             [phone]

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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[Thomas Wood-2]

On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 17:15 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> Some folks at Sun (not including me, really) have been working up some  
> ideas for a control center shell refresh.  If I'd been more organised  
> I'd have liked to give a lightning talk or something about it in Gran  
> Canaria last week, but have done the next best thing instead-- I've  
> just blogged about it :)
>
> <http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/2009/07/14/control-center-refresh/>
>


Well, this is excellent, I've been thinking about something like this
for some time, wish I'd heard about it sooner!

Not sure about the rollover/in place menu, how well does this scale?

How is Sun planning on implementing this?

Regards,

Thomas

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[William Jon McCann-3]

Hey Calum,

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Calum Benson<Calum.Benson@...> wrote:
> Some folks at Sun (not including me, really) have been working up some ideas
> for a control center shell refresh.  If I'd been more organised I'd have
> liked to give a lightning talk or something about it in Gran Canaria last
> week, but have done the next best thing instead-- I've just blogged about it
> :)
>
> <http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/2009/07/14/control-center-refresh/>

Thanks so much for doing this.  It looks really neat.  It is also
really nice to have the card sorting data there.

I think a new control center shell will be an important part of our
GNOME 3.0 story.  However, that means that we need to get moving on
this pretty soon.  I think a first task may be to try to reconcile
some of the ideas in your work with some of those that Matthew Thomas
put here:
http://live.gnome.org/SystemSettings

One thing that I really like about Matthew's design is keeping
everything in one toplevel window.  But it seems to me like that would
also be possible with the stuff you blogged about, right?

Calum, what do you think of http://live.gnome.org/SystemSettings?
And Matthew, what do you think of
http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/2009/07/14/control-center-refresh ?

It seems to me that we're moving in the right direction.  Good news!

Thanks,
Jon
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[Calum Benson]

On 14 Jul 2009, at 21:12, Thomas Wood wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 17:15 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
>> Some folks at Sun (not including me, really) have been working up  
>> some
>> ideas for a control center shell refresh.  If I'd been more organised
>> I'd have liked to give a lightning talk or something about it in Gran
>> Canaria last week, but have done the next best thing instead-- I've
>> just blogged about it :)
>>
>> <http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/2009/07/14/control-center-refresh/>
>>
>
> Well, this is excellent, I've been thinking about something like this
> for some time, wish I'd heard about it sooner!
>
> Not sure about the rollover/in place menu, how well does this scale?

Well, that partly depends on how the capplets end up being distributed  
among the top level categories, I guess, but it's certainly a  
potential concern.  That said, the idea of a more compact control  
center isn't to give carte-blanche to developers to implement a whole  
bunch of new capplets just because there's now more room for them :)  
We'd still want to keep a tight rein on that, as we've been trying to  
do in recent years.

(I'm still pinging the designers to join in the discussion here and/or  
on the blog, as they'll have thought about these sorts of issues a lot  
more than I have...)

> How is Sun planning on implementing this?

No firm plans there as yet, so hopefully in whatever way works best  
for the community, if people want to go down this route-- the more  
people we can persuade to help out, the better :)  There's literally  
no source code at all yet, just those Flash demos, so we're certainly  
looking for input on how you'd want us to proceed with any development.

As I mentioned over on d-d-l, it's probably also worth mentioning that  
part of Sun's motivation for working on the control center at all is  
to integrate with the Visual Panels work[1] that we're also doing,  
which will probably largely replace gnome-system-tools on the  
OpenSolaris desktop over time.

While it's not immediately obvious that Visual Panels have a useful  
life outside of OpenSolaris, by all means have a look at what we're  
doing there too, and if there's anything that might be useful upstream  
we'd be happy to figure out how to make that happen, too.

Cheeri,
Calum.

[1] http://opensolaris.org/os/project/vpanels/

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson@...            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             [phone]

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
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[Federico Mena Quintero]

On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 17:15 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:

> <http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/2009/07/14/control-center-refresh/>

This is really nice.  Thanks for conducting a really well-done usability
study :)  I like the idea of the big categories with easily-to-explore
subitems.

[My pet peeve right now with the control center is that common things
are buried very deep.  How do you change your mouse cursor, because it's
too small?  It's not under Mouse.  It's not under Appearance.  You have
to go all the way, deep down into Appearance -> Theme -> Customize ->
Pointer.  "Pointer"!  Isn't that a breed of dog?]

  Federico

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[Calum Benson]

On 14 Jul 2009, at 23:19, William Jon McCann wrote:

> One thing that I really like about Matthew's design is keeping
> everything in one toplevel window.  But it seems to me like that would
> also be possible with the stuff you blogged about, right?

I think so... as I understand it anyway, Jenya and Kristin's proposal  
is really supposed to be Phase 1 of a two-phase approach.  The first  
phase being to implement an improved control center that nonetheless  
still just launches the current capplets in their own windows (but  
opened at specific tabs, where required), and the second phase being  
to work on the capplets themselves and potentially integrate them into  
a single window model.

> Calum, what do you think of http://live.gnome.org/SystemSettings?
> And Matthew, what do you think of
> http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/2009/07/14/control-center-refresh ?

I don't think it's too much different from what I'd imagine Phase 2 of  
Jenya and Kristin's approach could look like, so I think we're  
generally aiming in the same direction.

Interesting to see Matthew is thinking about an explicit menu bar  
though... of course, the Mac's control centre has this as well, but I  
wonder how many people ever notice or need to use it (since in OS X of  
course, the menu bar lives up at the top of the screen).  I'd  
certainly never looked at it before today, and now that I have, I've  
just realised I've been missing the ability to organise everything  
alphabetically rather than by those annoying categories for all these  
years :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson@...            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             [phone]

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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[Calum Benson]

On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 17:15 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> Some folks at Sun (not including me, really) have been working up some  
> ideas for a control center shell refresh.  If I'd been more organised  
> I'd have liked to give a lightning talk or something about it in Gran  
> Canaria last week, but have done the next best thing instead-- I've  
> just blogged about it :)

As I noted in
<http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/2009/08/17/control-center-refresh-redux/>,
a further round of usability testing was completed last week on three
different control center designs (one being the current control center
shell).  

Kristin's now on leave for a couple of weeks though, so we probably
won't have much in the way of results to share until mid-September or
so.

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson@...            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             [phone]

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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[Rodrigo Moya]

On Tue, 2009-08-25 at 15:39 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 17:15 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> > Some folks at Sun (not including me, really) have been working up some  
> > ideas for a control center shell refresh.  If I'd been more organised  
> > I'd have liked to give a lightning talk or something about it in Gran  
> > Canaria last week, but have done the next best thing instead-- I've  
> > just blogged about it :)
>
> As I noted in
> <http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/2009/08/17/control-center-refresh-redux/>,
> a further round of usability testing was completed last week on three
> different control center designs (one being the current control center
> shell).  
>
> Kristin's now on leave for a couple of weeks though, so we probably
> won't have much in the way of results to share until mid-September or
> so.
>

well, we're frozen now, so that's a perfect time for 2.30/3.0 work :)


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[Matthias Clasen-2]

>> Kristin's now on leave for a couple of weeks though, so we probably
>> won't have much in the way of results to share until mid-September or
>> so.
>>
> well, we're frozen now, so that's a perfect time for 2.30/3.0 work :)
>

So,  is anybody going to pick up the 'control center refresh' for 2.29/2.30 ?
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[Calum Benson]

On 1 Nov 2009, at 19:31, Matthias Clasen wrote:

>>> Kristin's now on leave for a couple of weeks though, so we probably
>>> won't have much in the way of results to share until mid-September  
>>> or
>>> so.
>>>
>> well, we're frozen now, so that's a perfect time for 2.30/3.0 work :)
>>
>
> So,  is anybody going to pick up the 'control center refresh' for  
> 2.29/2.30 ?

I haven't heard anything from Kristin in a while, I'll ping her to see  
what's happening.

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson@...            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             [phone]

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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[Calum Benson]

On 3 Nov 2009, at 12:37, Calum Benson wrote:

>
> On 1 Nov 2009, at 19:31, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>
>>>> Kristin's now on leave for a couple of weeks though, so we probably
>>>> won't have much in the way of results to share until mid-September or
>>>> so.
>>>>
>>> well, we're frozen now, so that's a perfect time for 2.30/3.0 work :)
>>>
>>
>> So,  is anybody going to pick up the 'control center refresh' for 2.29/2.30 ?
>
> I haven't heard anything from Kristin in a while, I'll ping her to see what's happening.

So, the short answer is that she's working on higher priority things in Sun at the moment; such is life.  

However, I've been asked to pick up the designs and run with them, and start turning them into working prototypes (most likely in Python).  But the decision to release GNOME 3.0 next September should give us a good chance to make sure we have something by then that will scale as well as possible and integrate nicely with gnome-shell, I think.

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson@...            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             [phone]

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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[Thomas Wood-2]

On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 15:45 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:

> > I haven't heard anything from Kristin in a while, I'll ping her to
> see what's happening.
>
> So, the short answer is that she's working on higher priority things
> in Sun at the moment; such is life.  
>
> However, I've been asked to pick up the designs and run with them, and
> start turning them into working prototypes (most likely in Python).
> But the decision to release GNOME 3.0 next September should give us a
> good chance to make sure we have something by then that will scale as
> well as possible and integrate nicely with gnome-shell, I think.

The Moblin team are interested in investigating this aspect of
control-center too, especially with respect to having a one-window
approach. I've encouraged our designers to get on this mailing list so
hopefully they'll be able to post their thoughts soon.

Regards,

Thomas

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