Hi Johannes,
I have seen much too much nice looking design ideas for setup tools which simply cannot be implemented correctly because they are against the design of the underlying stuff in the system.
I wonder what the underlying stuff might be in our case?
In http://en.opensuse.org/YaST/Development/New_Control_Center there is "distinguish between configured and not-configured modules"
Maybe it would be better to distinguish between "installed and available but not yet installed modules".
"In order to display any module on two pages, some modules need to go. ... Grouping every thing up intelligently would save a lot modules without loosing functionality. Of course this means a lot of changes to the modules itself." A nice attempt to get rid of your original problem how to make a good design for the zillions of existing modules by simply introduce a much bigger new problem (which should be solved by someone else) to reduce the number of modules.
:-) Nonetheless, we should carefully check, whether some modules make sense the way they are. But even by reducing/reorganizing some of them I think, that there will be many modules left, which have to be arranged somehow.
When I read http://en.opensuse.org/YaST/Development/New_Control_Center I have the feeling that you think mostly in terms of "just another UI design" but I think that UI design cannot solve any real problem.
If I got it correctly, the assumption is, that zillions of modules are similar to zillions of options. I am not sure about that. IMHO you do not have zillions of options in a control centre, but just one and that is to pick the right module.
Perhaps the ideas regarding "dealing with 5,000,000 use-cases" at http://www.mmiworks.net/eng/publications/labels/openPrinting.html
That is an interesting approach. If I got it right, it emphases the tasks, the user wants to accomplish (e.g. paper saving, impressive printing), which can be combined by using a matrix.
might help to find a design so that the YaST Control Center can better deal with zillions of modules?
Have to think about it :-) Kind regards, Martin -- Martin Schmidkunz User Experience Specialist martin.schmidkunz@novell.com +49 (0) 911 740 53-346 ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Novell, Inc. SUSE® Linux Enterprise 10 Your Linux is ready http://www.novell.com/linux -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org