A few weeks ago I posted my initial reaction to the new ‘Add to Panel’ dialog that had snuck into Ubuntu Breezy, and it wasn’t very positive 🙂 It also provoked the most comments I’ve ever had on a blog entry, many in agreement, and some not.
To his credit, Manu took my comments very well, pointed out one or two things about the design that I hadn’t noticed, and asked me if I’d blog about it again once the design had settled down a bit.
So, here I am looking at it again.
On the positive side, it now fits on an 800×600 screen, and the categories are all filled out a bit more, so the initial “what a waste of space” reaction is gone (although it still hits a bit if you scroll down to the Internet and Multimedia sections, which only have one item apiece in them.)
To be honest, I don’t think I’m ever really going to like the OSX SystemPrefs-like layout; the first impression you get when the window opens is that the icons are arranged almost randomly, because they’re sorted in three dimensions rather than the simple alphabetical list we’ve all become used to. The description of each applet is also rather hidden away (near the bottom of the dialog), compared to the old design where it’s right beside the applet in question. Tooltips might work better here.
The search box is promising, but needs a little more work to be spot on (ignoring, for the moment, the fact that it works like nothing else in GNOME). It filters the visible list based on what you type, searching both the applet names and descriptions. So, typing ‘sound’ will leave you with just the “Volume Control” applet on display. It doesn’t actually select any results, though, even when there’s only one matching applet, so you can’t just hit Enter straight away to add it. Nor are the results ranked in any way, so if I search for ‘log’, I get ‘Blog Entry Poster’ and ‘Log Out’ in that order, even though it’s most likely ‘Log Out’ that I’m looking for. That’s probably not a big deal with the small search domain we’re dealing with here, though.
Another problem is that the applet descriptions can’t (and shouldn’t) include every word that a user will search for. As an example, the first four search terms I used to try and ‘find’ the Rhythmbox applet were MP3, CD, player and jukebox, none of which gave me any matches. We’d probably need some sort of hidden keyword system for this to work as well as Apple’s does.
Other minor gripes are that it doesn’t currently allow multiple selections, and longer applet names get clipped. A bigger issue is the icons on display don’t seem to respect the current theme, which will need to be fixed to be considered accessible.
Verdict: it’s a lot better, and I expect I could live with it. But personally I still prefer the old one 🙂
same here. i prefer the old one too, but won’t make a scandal that they changed it. too bad though. and this search bar should really be at the bottom IMVHO.
I prefer the really old version, a load of submenus!
I dont use or want to change the panel applets often enough to think it makes a huge difference either way and nowadays Gnome has better defaults and less reason to change things around. The real problem I think is that it is just hard to coherently display large quantities of applets and the distributors need to keep the numbers down to modest amounts.
(Windows Tweak UI includes a options which allow you to have lots of submenus in the main menu instead of being taken directly to the control panel, so maybe Gnome has also allows similar tweaks I just haven’t found yet.)
At the moment the biggest usability flaw in Gnome for me is the lack of searchable help, which I am finding increasingly annoying (as I am actually reading the documentation occasionally). It is something I am surprised none of the major distributions have tried to fix yet.
My first impression of this application; If you need to search for an applet, you’ve either a) got to many system preference applets to choose from or b) what you do have is not well organized. Just a thought.
The search functionality needs a bit of work but I like this new inferface. If gnome-control-center could be made to mimic this behaviour so that the System > Preferences menu can be eliminated I’d be be pretty happy.
I currently use Ubuntu (Hoary) and the GNOME desktop daily for all of my desktop tasks and have been for the last year. I admire the usability development efforts that continue to improve with every release. I have preview the Breezy release and it is great, the only rant I have is that when features get implemented/changed in GNOME, there is no way to change back to the old behavior without some hacking (albiet not in all cases).
Easy way to solve this problem with the applets menu:
Put some type of switch in there where you may choose the view you want, I.E. categorized (2.12) or the list in 2.10.
Also, if I had one wish, I would like the GNOME hackers to bunch all of the configuration apps in one window. Sort of like KDE, OS X, Windows.. Maybe it could be just a launcher for the apps.
Thanks for this update. Just wanted to say that I’m actually reading this blog entry and its comments, and I will consider any enhancement suggestion.
My latest patch corrects something you mentionned in this post : when the user is acutally using the search bar (ie the search text is not empty), the first shown entry is automatically selected. And you can activate the selected entry by pressing Enter (even from the search bar). Therefore, you can now actually open a dialog, type one or two words, and just press Enter to add your applet.
https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=16169
@Manu: cool, that should certainly make the search experience a lot smoother.