Category: control-center

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Settings: new Search panel

I haven’t been working on GNOME Settings for quite some time now. Currently, I am focusing mostly on GNOME Boxes, Usage, and Fedora Silverblue. To be fair I still have some love for Settings and I enjoy context-switching once in a while to hack on code bases which I don’t face daily. Unfortunately I can’t do this more often.

A few years ago I pushed a WIP version of the Settings “Search” panel that never got merged because we were in a moment of transition in the project and at the time we thought that introducing Drag & Drop capabilities to GtkListBox would make sense still in gtk3. Fast forward, we are far from even starting to port Settings to gtk4, but people got to use the panels! For this reason, I rebased and iterated a bit over the Search panel in order to make it identical to the mockups. The final result is previewed below and will be available in our next stable release, 3.34.

P.S.: I haven’t blogged much in the last couple of years mostly because I always felt that blog posts required a certain amount of *amazingness*. Now I’m convinced that small pills, highlighting something as small as the work above, have a place in this blog (better than not blogging at all). 🙂

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User account fallback images in GNOME 3.32

Your face might resemble this one in the left (avatar-default) as much as it could be pretty much everyone else using the same computer as you. With this in mind, we introduced a small feature in GNOME 3.32 that intends to make it easier for users to identify themselves in a list of system users, such as in the login screen or in Settings.

From now on, GNOME won’t set the “avatar-default” icon for users created in the Initial Setup or in Setting. It will create a colourful image with the user’s initials on it.

The colour palette is the same used in the new icon guidelines (if you haven’t heard yet, we are living now a Big App Icon Revolution in GNOME!). User names (full names) are mapped to colours in the palette, and therefore are consistent everywhere you enter the exact full user name. So get used to your colour!

Nothing else about the user image setup is going to change. You still can:

  1. Select a picture with a file chooser.
  2. Take a picture with your webcam.
  3. Select one of the GNOME stock avatars.

Another detail that came with these changes is that now user images will be rounded everywhere in GNOME. These efforts are part of the “Consistent user images across GNOME” initiative.

User Accounts panel in Settings
GNOME Initial Setup
Login screen

GNOME 3.32.0 is coming out next week! o/

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New Users Panel

The GNOME Control Center redesign goes on. This release we are happy to announce the new Users Panel design. As you can see in the preview video below, we are moving away from a two column panel into a single page concept. These changes make the panel way clearer specially with the new shell.

In terms of user interface/experience, the Carousel is the main star of the new Users panel. It presents the system users, alphabetically sorted, three at the time. Its pagination allows browsing through the user list. The arrow indicates the selected item.

The Users panel now joins the Keyboard, Printers, and Mouse, as the new Settings experience. We plan to switch to the new Shell in the very next cycle. Stay tuned!

 

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New Mouse & Touchpad Panel

New Mouse & Touchpad panel

GNOME Control Center is getting a new design in the near future, but firstly we need to port the panels to match the new concept. Thus I have been working on the new Mouse & Touchpad panel.

The Test Your Settings dialog is now presented within the control-center window.

What’s interesting about this concept — besides of the fresh and minimalist look & feel — is that it only shows relevant settings to you. So, for instance, it won’t have a Touchpad section if you don’t have a supported touchpad device, and so on…

Some of you might miss the double-click delay setting that used to belong to the Mouse & Touchpad panel. Don’t worry, it is now part of the Universal Access panel.

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This changes are already on master and will be included in our next release, GNOME 3.20.

After that I will be tackling the Keyboards panel. The goal is to have all panels ready for the new Control Center shell.