On May 30, 2007, at 6:12 AM, Sebastian Heinlein wrote:
... the new and shiny GTK frontend to displayconfig (the x configuration part of the KDE admin suite named guidance) has got some usability issues. I would like to start a discussion about this to get your input and comments.
So here's what the competition does: <http://think-well.org/articles/2006/12/28/managing-multiple-displays>
... https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DisplayConfigGTK
According to this specification, there will be one UI (gnome-display-properties) for people who have one display, another UI (display-config-gtk) for people who have two displays, and yet another UI (hacking the X config files yourself) for people who have three or more displays. I think this is unfortunate and unnecessary.
Having discussed this with you on IRC, I understand that the current situation is:
* we can't auto-detect the existence of displays, because of
limitations in X;
* we can't put a separate settings dialog on each display (like Mac OS
X does), because we can't rely on the config on any given display
being non-broken.
These make the interface more complex than it could be, but I still
think we could have a single interface for any number of displays.
At the top center of the window could be an option menu listing the available displays (defaulting to the primary display), followed by a separator, then items for managing multiple displays. The rest of the window would show settings for the current display. For example:
________________________________________
|(x) Displays (-)|
| ______________________ |
| |__LCD (Primary)_____:^| |
|________________________________________|
| |
| (display-specific settings here) |
: :
The menu when opened:
________________________________________
|(x) Displays (-)|
| ______________________ |
| |/:LCD:(Primary):::::::| |
|________| Canon LV-7575 |________|
| | Unknown | |
| |----------------------| |
| | Graphics Card... | |
| | Arrange Displays... | |
: """""""""""""""""""""" :
"Graphics Card..." and "Arrange Displays..." would both open separate
dialogs, and would not be actual choices.
I agree with Corey and Mikko that the arrangement UI should use draggable thumbnails of each display. For accessibility, each thumbnail could be focusable and movable using the arrow keys.
Cheers -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
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