All Settings button on main screen is useless

[Jeremy Bícha]

When System Settings is in overview mode, showing all of the available panels, the All Settings button is present but nothing happens when it's clicked. A button that does nothing when clicked is frustrating and it's a very prominent button.

I'd like to propose that we hide the All Settings button when in the overview mode, which is what upstream does.

Another useless button is the current panel name. As in the Appearance button in All Settings>Appearance. This might be improved by showing the button pressed in like Nautilus does.

The more I think about it, the more I think GNOME 3.4's symbolic view grid button does pretty good at conveying the same information in far less space, especially as there are only 2 levels in the hierarchy (the overview and the individual panel view).

See bug 933482 where System Setting's breadcrumb design was proposed.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: gnome-control-center 1:3.3.5-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-16.25-generic 3.2.6
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-16-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.91-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Feb 16 21:09:06 2012
SourcePackage: gnome-control-center
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
usr_lib_gnome-control-center:
 activity-log-manager-control-center 0.9.1-0ubuntu2
 deja-dup 21.2-0ubuntu4
 indicator-datetime 0.3.1-0ubuntu5

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Desired solution:

Replace the "All settings" button with a breadcrumb as detailed in the "Gnome 3 System Settings changes" design specification ( https://docs.google.com/a/canonical.com/document/d/1ILTJDiDCd25Npt2AmgzF8aOnZZECxTfM0hvsbWT2BxA/edit )

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks Jeremy, Ccing design but some comments:

> When System Settings is in overview mode, showing all of the available panels, the All Settings button is present but nothing happens when it's clicked. A button that does nothing when clicked is frustrating and it's a very prominent button.

That's not so much a button that a location indication, when you open nautilus the breadcum displaying the current dir as well...

> I'd like to propose that we hide the All Settings button when in the overview mode, which is what upstream does.

That would be weird and not how i.e nautilus use its breadcumb, consistency is good

> Another useless button is the current panel name. As in the Appearance button in All Settings>Appearance. This might be improved by showing the button pressed in like Nautilus does.

Well again, it's not so much of a button than an indication of where you stand ;-) The button style and ui needs to be improved, we landed the change in a rough way before ff

> The more I think about it, the more I think GNOME 3.4's symbolic view grid button does pretty good at conveying the same information in far less space, especially as there are only 2 levels in the hierarchy (the overview and the individual panel view).

Well I think one of the issue with the upstream way is that if you open directly a capplet (i.e the background one) and click on the 'all settings' (or now grid icon) which brings you back to the g-c-c grid it's hard to figure what happened and how to go back where you were, the breadcumb gives you logical representation of where you stand which is much easier to understand

ie. having [ system settings ] [ background ] with the first button selected let you easily go back to background or figure what happens, you just went down one level