I’ve been looking recently at what can be done to improve the GNOME Control Center shell for both GNOME 3.0 and for Moblin. In Moblin, we wanted a single window approach, so that finding a setting and opening a preference pane could be done within a single environment. After some discussion on IRC and on the control center mailing list, it seems people within the Gnome community were also interested in this idea. I’ve been having a go at prototyping this behaviour to see how it would turn out. We’ve now gone through a couple of iterations of refining the design into something that is more promising. Here are some screenshots of how it looks right now:
Displaying all settings categories:
Searching for a setting:
Opening up the keyboard preferences:
The work is all available in the single-window-shell branch of gnome-control-center. At the moment, the single window behaviour is implemented using the XEmbed protocol via GtkPlug and GtkSocket. This allowed us to quickly prototype and experiment with the behaviour while making minimal changes to the existing capplets, although any capplets without the added functionality will open in a new window as before. Jon McCann of RedHat is also looking at using GIO Extension Point based approach, but this requires a more significant re-write of the capplets.
At the upcoming GNOME Usability hackfest I hope to gather more feedback on the design and possibly start working on refining the UI for many of the individual preference panes as well.