shurcool-legacy / software-settings Goto Github PK

The Secrets third-party preference pane for Mac OS X allows you to set the hidden options of many apps – the options not found in the settings pane in the app, settable only on the command line, with a command like defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect scale.

Like your idea, it has an interface that shows what settings have been changed from the default – changed settings are bold. It also supports representing setting values in a way appropriate to their type – boolean settings have a checkbox that may or many not be inverted compared to the boolean, choices get a menu, etc. It supports long descriptions for each setting.

You may want to mention Secrets in your writing, and compare your solution to it.

The wiki says this:

You can let the user see all settings and their values, if you want. I don’t think it will make their lives better. After all, current software usually does not give access to its full source code, which is the only way to really know all the details of the settings that the software provides, and most people are okay with that. The majority of users does not decompile your software to figure out all of the settings potentially available to them.

I don’t think your argument about decompilation makes sense. Just because users don’t decompile software to figure out its settings, that doesn’t mean they don’t care about the settings. It just means that it’s not worth the excessive trouble of decompilation. There are very few settings in current software that are not settable in Preferences, but are settable if you decompile the software and find some hidden flag. Users don’t care because they’re not missing much. But if you removed the existing feature of viewing all settings by choosing Preferences from a menu, making decompilation the only way to see all settings, users certainly might object to that, and demand for decompilation might even rise enough to make it popular.

As well as thinking your argument doesn’t hold, I also very much disagree that it won’t help users to see all settings and their values. There are two advantages in seeing a list of settings instead of searching for a setting.

One, it lets us search the list manually if we don’t know what words they would call a setting. For instance, if there are settings related to Chrome’s Incognito mode, but the user doesn’t know the name of the feature and thinks it’s called Private Browsing, then they won’t be able to find the setting by searching. Only by scanning through the list can they find that setting that they wanted to change. And yes, the developer could put “keywords: private browsing, no history” at the bottom of the description for the setting. But no developer is going to think of all the possible words users might use to describe a feature; the user still needs the fallback of manually looking through all settings.

Two, the user needs the list of all settings to tell what settings the software does and doesn’t allow to be changed. There are some things a user may expect to be changeable, but aren’t. If they search for it, they won’t get any results, but the user will worry that they’re just not searching right. They would need to see the whole list of settings to be sure that the setting they want isn’t in there. Also, there are times when the software surprises a user and allows changing something they didn’t think would be changeable. The user would have no way of knowing that they can search for and change that setting without seeing it in the list of all settings.

One example is Mac OS X’s Finder’s setting “Show warning before changing an extension”.

It is on by default, as it should be, to protect ameteur computer users. When you try to rename a file from “foo.txt.html” to “foo.txt”, the Finder pops up a confirmation dialog recommending you to leave the extension alone. But this is very annoying for advanced computer users who know how extensions work and sometimes get files in the wrong extension. A long time ago, I opened Finder Preferences and looked at all options to see if they were what I want. I saw that the warning was set to show, and turned it off. But if I hadn’t been able to look at the list of all settings, I would never have guessed that Finder allows you to turn off the warning. I would have been stuck with that alert for years until I randomly stumbled across an Internet article saying “search for ‘extension’ in the Finder settings to turn off the confirmation dialog”.

Another setting that no one would guess is Firefox’s “Tell websites I do not want to be tracked”.

It is off by default, which is good because otherwise websites would still track users with that setting on, reasoning that they didn’t really mean it, but just left the default on. But some privacy-conscious people might browse Firefox’s Preferences, and see that setting, and turn it on. Yet no one would think that that option exists if they didn’t see it in the list.

Firefox has a nice hidden interface for setting preferences, viewable by visiting the URL “about:config”.

Like your idea, it allows you to see what settings have been changed – by their value in the “Status” column, which you can sort the list of settings by, and by the row being bold. It also allows searching of settings. And unlike your idea, it allows you to see all settings and their values. However, it doesn’t have descriptions of the settings; the name of the settings is the only hint you get in that interface. This is probably because it’s meant as a fallback interface for changing settings; the main interfaces for Firefox and its add-ons are the fixed collection of UI elements that you dislike.

Since “about:config” is so similar to your idea, you should probably acknowledge it in your writing. You should incorporate any good ideas in “about:config” you hadn’t thought of into your own idea. And after that, since your idea will still be different from “about:config”, if you justified the main differences between your idea and “about:config” (explained why your way is better), that would make your proposal more convincing.