GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 375724
Better layout algo. for settings dialog
Last modified: 2006-11-27 17:51:14 UTC
The magnifier perk has a pretty healthy set of options. The current top-to-bottom layout with nested groups of widgets in its settings panel looks pretty ugly. We need to "pretty" the layout a bit. Some ideas: 1) Let some widgets fall side by side in a two column layout. 2) Groups within groups should go in two columns if there's an odd number of them. 3) Groups containing groups should span the two columns. 4) Container text should be bolded or otherwise called out.
Created attachment 76742 [details] [review] Some UI improvements I can't say it's perfect, but this patch does a couple of things to keep the UI within Gnome's HIG. The frame styling has changed, the labels are all left justified, and the checkboxes are used as intended. I feel like it is a good idea to conform with the way every other application uses checkboxes. Besides those changes, I'm not sure what else we could do. Most of Gnome's programs preferences dialogs have a one column layout. Although I might give that a shot later. I think the best thing is to minimize the amount of settings exposed to the user on that dialog, and perhaps in the magnifier case offer an advanced settings dialog.
Going to look at this fix in a moment, but had an idea I wanted to jot down. We could turn some groups of options into tabs, maybe based on whether or not they contain other groups or many options. Would additional tabs besides the main row at the top be confusing? We already do it in the profile section.
Applied the submitted patch to CVS HEAD. Will open a new bug about advanced settings or better groupings.