GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 405078
Shell windows takes too much screen space
Last modified: 2010-09-29 13:37:36 UTC
The new control center shell window takes a lot of space on the screen. This means at least a few capplets are not visible the first time you launch the c-c until you scroll down a bit; even on a 1024x768 screen about only half of the available capplets are visible without scrolling.when the user launches the control center. I think it would be easier to find a capplet if they were all visible at the same time, without the need to "hunt" a specific capplet. A few suggestions that might help: 1) remove the sidebar. Without it you wouldn't be able to filter by category, but if we can remove the need for a scrollbar is it a big deal? 2) use 32x32 icons by default. This is would also make the shell consistent with the application-browser. 3) use text below icons. Is there a reason text-beside-icons are used? I know this kind of layout is common on Windows XP and probably Vista, but it's a first for GNOME. Personally I'm not much of a fan, as it uses more space to display the same information and makes things more cluttered. Other information: One of the most common complaint about the new shell is that it's slow. I don't think people find that only because it takes a few seconds to load the first time, but also because they're slower to find a capplet on the shell than on a standard menu. I think a more "compact" shell would help a great deal. Hopefully you'll like at least one or two of my suggestions. :)
Moving to main menu...
Created attachment 82319 [details] Screenshot of some of your suggestions Your suggestions sound pretty good to me. I quickly (and dirtily...) hacked slab to have text under icons and removed the sidebar. See the attachment to see how it looks like (naturally it would need some tweaking, but the concept is nice IMO). Maybe put a search entry above the the list and change the behavior to highlighting (would work nicely with tiles from the optics)?
You could keep the (handy) filtering hability by using a layout close to the one of ubuntu's "add to panel" dialog: a filter entry on top of the dialog
Created attachment 82393 [details] Screenshot for new cc shell layout How about this?
Nice Denis. Is it possible to get a broom icon in the search bar?
(In reply to comment #5) > Nice Denis. Is it possible to get a broom icon in the search bar? > See bug #385534 :)
Like the smaller icons by default (which makes the tiles more compact). Changed that and committed to svn. Absolutely need to keep the filter ability. Problem with removing the sidebar is you lose the common tasks also. Since these are easily customized by the user (see the /apps/control-center/cc_actions_list gconf key) they are quite useful for the ~3 or 4 options you perform the most. Also even in the mockup we still need to scroll which means without the sidebar you lose the ability to quickly jump to a group without scrolling. Still an ongoing discussion in #control-center about the best way to eliminate some whitespace and make the tiles / layout more compact.
I think this is a problem we should tackle for 2.20, when we are merging capplets. We will then see how much space we will really need. Hope we will be able to say goodbye to scrolling! :)
Denis, the filter textbox is so big it isn't apparent what it is from a glance. Should be a smaller box in the right-hand side. But, I disagree with the bug description. I have found I am a lot more efficient with the category buttons, combined with the filter on the sidebar, than I am with the GNOME <= 2.16 style menus. Maybe it's just the way I am, but I get confused by so many _choices_. I prefer to be able to highlight and digest one category of preference applets at a time.
(In reply to comment #2) > Created an attachment (id=82319) [details] > Screenshot of some of your suggestions This is pretty much how the new control-center for GNOME 3.0 looks like :)