The reason the initial project was about input preferences is two-fold:
- It is likely already enough work to get a good design for just that part working (merging keymaps, keyboard, touchpad, mouse preferences, possibly adding tablet/touchscreen and joysticks)
- Doing it right involves more than creating a window that merely allows to reach existing panels. In the case of input preferences, I’d expect the main window to list all my input devices, for example a typical situation for me would be:
- 1 touchpad or trackpoint in my laptop
- 1 external trackball or mouse (possibly with more than 3 buttons)
- 1 internal keyboard
- 1 external keyboard
I should be able to set different preferences for each. For example, my laptops have a French AZERTY keyboard, but I also use an external keyboard when I’m at home, and this one is spanish QWERTY. For the mouse/trackball vs trackpoint/touchpad, I would much appreciate being able to set different acceleration settings for each of them.
If you start thinking about this, I think you will probably end up with something similar to the Media preferences or Network preferences: a list of devices, which allows you to reach specific settings for each. And you can see the same applies to Printer preferences, for example.
So the next idea is: how can we avoid having these list of devices in each preference panel? Can we instead design a central place where you see a list of all devices and can easily reach the appropriate preference window for each of them? I think that is what the preferences application should be.