Comment 60 for bug 22007

Oliver has asked me to comment on the UI for the new screensaver settings. I have several suggestions, but I do not think any of them should block this code being introduced to Ubuntu, because it implements such an important missing feature without critical problems. (I understand that other things may hold it up, such as Edubuntu not having room to include Mono.) Furthermore, some of these suggestions are problems with gnome-screensaver already, not with the rewrite in particular.

* "xFX Screensaver Settings" should be "Screensaver". ("xFX" is, alas, inappropriate branding. "Settings" is probably redundant, because there is no other "Screensaver" window.)

* When using control A can (or should) disable control B, A should be above B, to prevent people from wasting time twiddling things that end up inapplicable. Here, "Activate the screensaver when the computer is idle" determines whether *any* of the other controls are relevant, so it should go at the top, not near the bottom.

* "Regard the computer as idle after:" violates Ockham's UI Razor in that it needlessly introduces a new entity: something mysterious that does "regarding" of idle state. This can be avoided by merging with the "Activate the screensaver" checkbox:

    [/] When the computer has been idle for: [10 minutes :^]

The menu would be disabled when the checkbox was unchecked. (Using a menu like this, instead of a slider, would require offering a selection of likely values.)

* The rewrite says "10" without saying what the units are. This can be fixed by implementing the previous suggestion (or by adding units to the live slider value).

* I suggest pulling "Blank screen" and "Random" out of the list of screensavers. Instead have a separate "Show:" menu, immediately under the menu I suggested above, with three options: "Blank screen", "One screensaver", and "Randomly-chosen screensaver". When "Blank screen" is chosen, the list of screensavers (and the "Properties" button) is disabled; when "One screensaver" is chosen, the list behaves as normal; and when "Random screensaver" is chosen, each screensaver in the list begins with a checkbox for determining whether it is part of the random selection.

* "Properties" should be "Options...", and "Name Of Screensaver Here Properties" should be "Name Of Screensaver Here Options". (Everywhere except Microsoft and Windows software, "properties" are things that might or might not be changeable, making it a needlessly vague term when referring solely to things that *are* changeable.)

* In the options window, the name of the screensaver should be displayed only once (in the title bar), not twice. (This also means removing the separator. Actually, both separators should go.)

* In the options window, the various options should have 6 pixels between them, both horizontally and vertically.

* When an option is represented by a slider, its label should be followed by a colon. For example, "Display Speed" should be "Display Speed:". (Actually, it should be "Display speed:" in sentence case, but if you're auto-generating the options GUI there's probably little you can do about that.)

* It's not clear what the "Description" button does.

* "Fullscreen" is not obvious -- people may wonder, why *wouldn't* they want their screensaver to be full-screen? This button probably should say "Test" instead.

* "Power Management" would be better as "Power Settings...". (Hardly anyone "manages" power, except people who work at power companies.)

Thank you for working on this!