[GSoC 2017] Preferences GUI Refactoring - Weekly Report 5

Hello World.

The second evaluation got over recently, and wanted to update my progress. My last blog post had discussion that custom preflets wanted to be added into SuperPrefs. It has been implemented now. Along with the exisitng boxes for specific categories, there’s now a box for Custom preflets, which includes third party preflets which come along with installation of apps. I also was working with implementation of Sorting of the entries in boxes, users can sort it based on Category, or Alphabetically, both has been done now. Followed with some alignment of icons, and the buttons in the UI to look more uniform.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/anirudhm/2017-07-30_gsoc_2017_preferences_gui_refactoring_-_weekly_report_5/
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Making great progress! I left some issues on the github page.

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Looks good! Definitely putting some interesting ideas out there around how to quickly access preferences and applications.

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Thanks for the appreciation @Perelandra0x309 and for filing the issues. I had a look at them, I’ll work on them ASAP. :slight_smile:

Thank you @kallisti5 :smile:

I think you should change “Apps” checkbox:

I’m wondering when the project diverged from a preferences panel to a generic application launcher. That is not the goal and I think the UI for both should be very different.

May I ask why it is now working with apps instead of just preferences?

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I think this too, a super prefs should make set up the system easly not a other way to open the pref apps.

Yes the focus should be on making setting up Haiku easy. That includes finding the preflet you need quickly. Each preflet should have a list of tags or keywords that are also included in the search function. If I type in “monitor”, the Screen preflet should be highlighted. Take a look at MacOS system preferences, do a search and all the keywords are listed, and related preferences are highlighted. Something like that would make SuperPrefs truely helpful.

That’s the main focus of this project, that’s under implementation. Will update once it’s implemented. The apps view was just a few lines of additional code, I was just giving it a try to see the feedback of community. I guess that’d make SuperPrefs a launcher app. So, I’d rather not go with it.

I’m sorry, but I really don’t see the point of this project. Preflets as files seems to work fine, so why have a separate application to view them?

There is already type-ahead filtering in tracker. This could be more elegantly achieved by adding a pop up text box to tracker when you are using the type-ahead filter (as currently it is slightly confusing not being able to see what you type) and a new option in tracker that allows grouping icons by some user selectable attribute (in this case preflet category).

You could then make these sub divisions appear in any of trackers existing views, e.g. list view of tracker would have sub dividers between the listed files (in this case for appearance, input/output etc). This has use cases outside of just preflets. Sorry for the negativity.

The initial project idea was to have separate preferences for each device. The idea was to have an app which would list all your devices (network, input, display, etc), and allow to reach the matching preferences: Screen for a display, Network for a network adapter (with the right interface selected), Mouse for a mouse, etc. Eventually it should also allow to have different settings for different devices (for example, you could adjust the speed of your mouse and touchpad differently).

However, the student and mentor have somehow decided to go in a quite different direction, and I think lost the initial idea somewhere along the line. Unless there are plans for implementing this later on, now that we have some base application to work on?

In the lower left corner of the Tracker window you can see the filter string as you type it.

Please have a look at the issue thread, I’ve pushed a commit, and am in need of your response. Thanks in advance.