[Sugar-devel] [Design] Control Panel - improve space usage

[Simon Schampijer]

Hi,

I am sure most of you have seen the issues we have in the Control Panel 
when that you have to scroll even though there would be enough space to 
display the icons and many smaller fixes (for example [1][2]) have been 
proposed to fix that. We would like to improve the situation now for good.

Issues identified:

* Icons should be placed on the screen without having to scroll if there 
is enough space (see what nautilus is doing for example)

* the text should be wrapped if possible (see what a nautilus window 
does when having to display long file names). As a fallback if 
implementing the wrapping is too complicated we could as well ellipsize 
the names.

When implementing a fix it is important to keep the following:

* the 'about me' and 'about my computer' section should stay the first 
two items (keep documentation people happy)

* the screen color stays black (keep documentation people happy)

Gonzalo has been started to play with the gtk.IconView [3] using a 
gtk.ListStore [4] as a backend. This does give us the proper layout for 
free. What it does not seem to handle is wrapping of the names - so we 
have to look for other solutions here.

The search currently does grey out icons that does not match the search 
criteria. In the IconView/ListStore the normal way to filter the view is 
by displaying only the icons that match the criteria. Would that be an 
acceptable change in behavior here - other ideas?

Regards,
    Simon

[1] 
http://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar/mainline/commit/ecae03a35a505c4212271e415e618a1c5d271b3e
[2] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2280
[3] http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygtk/class-gtkiconview.html
[4] http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygtk/class-gtkliststore.html