On Apr 19, 2007, at 4:53 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: > > On Apr 17, 2007, at 1:57 AM, Thomas Wood wrote: > ... >> http://live.gnome.org/ControlCenter/AppearanceSettings > ... >> The themes tab provides a way of saving and apply a particular group >> of appearance settings. > ... >> This means it will change the settings on other tabs, and this is >> contrary to advice in the HIG. However, I am not sure if the advice >> in the HIG applies to this, as it is (or should be) fairly obvious >> that changing to a different theme will affect options not shown on >> the current tab. > ... > One way to fix the tab problem would be to follow the general layout > of the "Network Settings" window: have an option menu listing the > themes, centered above the set of tabs. The biggest drawback of this > approach would be that there would be nowhere for the theme previews > to go. > > Another approach would be to have a narrow vertical list of themes > with previews (each theme name under its preview) down the left, with > the tabs for adjusting the current theme (or auto-creating a custom > theme, if you started tweaking one of the presets) on the right. (If > you were determined to allow multiple custom themes, the bottom of the > theme list could have [+][-] buttons for adding/removing them.) > ...
A third approach would be to have a "theme" consist only of those settings in the "Appearance" tab, not the settings in any other tab. For example, it seems very unlikely that you'd want to change font rendering per-theme, and it makes more sense for the font choices themselves to be placed together with the font rendering controls than for the font choices to be theme-dependent. (It's also not really useful for font choices to be theme-dependent as long as Gnome distributions have a dearth of GUI-quality fonts, and that situation is unlikely to improve soon.) Cheers -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
