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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: kcontrol reorganization (was: UI enhancements)
From:       daniele () www ! dcs ! it
Date:       2003-01-26 14:37:16
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>I'm afraid you won't find support for this here, nested tabs are evil from a
>usability perspective, and if you found a more elegant way to support this
>idea, it is still called "user levels" and as such has been thrashed out
many
>times and has always ended up seen as a Bad Thing.

I'm no expert in UI design, so I leave it up to usability experts to find out
the best way to achieve this result.
Be it a select widget rather than a radio button.. don't know what is better
under the usability point of view.

Moreover, the point is not about "user levels", though this are the words
that I myself have used, but rather "user needs".
If you want, call the tabs (or window, or options, what you want) "basic
configuration", "advanced configuration" and "expert configuration", thus
addressing the adjective to the kind of action to be performed rather than to
the performer.  I said that the names thing was up to those who are expert of
this kind of matters, I'm surely not good enough.
The point is that a better way to allow kde configuration must be found, and
it must be planned to allow the seamless integration of the many options to
come.
Kcontrol as it is is already too bloated: this doesn't mean that it has too
many things in it, but that they are all scattered around and confusing.
I've been a kde user for several years (from the 1.x series), yet when I
changed to 3.1rc I spent at least 10-15 minutes to find out where the hell
should I go to configure the fonts used by konqueror as a file manager. I
still can't explain why they aren't accessible neither from konqueror
configuration, nor from the font-slection kcontrol module.

As a user, I really don't like the idea of having different applications for
different kind of settings, which is too sparse and confusing.
Neither I like the idea of having to edit files by hand, as it is a nonsense
that you have to use non-graphical tools to configure a graphical
environment.

Daniele
 
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