Prior to the netbook craze, we've always aimed for all our windows, dialogs, etc. to fit on an 800x600 screen. With the shorter and wider screens found on netbooks, 800x600 isn't realistic anymore. In that vein, I've started working on paring down Pidgin's preferences window to fit better on a netbook screen. Let's take a look at what I've done so far.
The first, and most obvious, change I've made is to move the tabs that were previously at the top of the preferences window to the side. I did this for two reasons--in my environment, I have a Browser tab because I don't use Windows or GNOME. This meant the tabs artificially forced my window to be wider than it strictly needed to be (our preference window "notebook," as it's called in GTK+ parlance, doesn't scroll or stack the tab row). Second, moving the tabs from the top to the left gains back some valuable pixels that help us fit on those really short screens. In retrospect, I didn't gain much--only about 20 pixels or so in my configuration--with the width of the actual pages of the notebook because of other changes I made to help the height. But every pixel of height counts to make us fit on short screens.
After that, I started picking on the Network tab. We have a lot of stuff that's just crammed into the Network tab. FIrst we have a bunch of stuff for automatically detecting your public IP address or optionally manually specifying one. Then we have some stuff for port forwarding. After that comes stuff for TURN relay servers, which is yet another method for traversing NAT "routers." Finally, we have the wonderful proxy server stuff. All this stuff being crammed on a single tab makes the dialog ridiculously tall and makes the Network tab tied with the Conversations tab for biggest overall height.
Clearly, a few changes were in order here. I made a minor change here that moved the port range spin buttons to be on the same "line" as the checkbox that enables and disables them. Beyond that, there were still a lot of changes that could be beneficial. For example, now that I've made the notebook tabs go down the left side of the window, that gives us a lot of room to better organize our preferences into tabs that make logical sense. Since I had this extra tab room to work with, it made sense to add a new tab to put the proxy configuration options on. While a proxy server is obviously a network configuration item, it's not always obvious to our users that the Network tab is the correct place to configure the global proxy settings.
Now, looking at the Smiley Themes tab, there's a crapton of wasted space there. Seemed to me like a perfect candidate to be the target of some moves. Over on the Interface tab, we have two theme selectors--one for buddy list themes and the other for status icon themes. I decided those were a better fit on a dedicated Themes tab, so I renamed the Smiley Themes tab to Themes and slapped those theme selectors in above the smiley theme selector. I also excised the sound theme selector from the Sounds tab and slapped it into the newly-renamed Themes tab. Elliott, another Pidgin developer, converted the smiley theme selector to be consistent with the other theme selectors. Now the Themes tab doesn't seem under-utilized, but it does still need a little work.
I also decided to reorder the tabs. I ordered them alphabetically, but intentionally left the Interface tab as our first tab. It seems to be convention that the "General" tab is the first tab in a notebook for a preferences window. In that vein, our Interface tab is our equivalent to a General tab, so I left it first to fit with convention. The order of the other tabs should be something logical. Sure, I could have grouped Browser, Network, and Proxy together, then grouped Conversations and Logging together, and later figured out where to stuff Sounds and Status/Idle, but an alphabetical arrangement is just as sensible considering that not all our tabs clearly separate into logical groups.
The next things to get rid of were the "Sound Method" section on the Sounds tab and the Auto-away section on the Status/Idle tab. Note here that I didn't actually remove any preferences; I simply removed a section and placed the relevant preferences in another section. The existing groupings seemed redundant and excessive. This seems better to me.
There, was, however, one thing I needed to give the axe to. Over on the Conversations tab, there was this annoying preference section called "Font" that contained two preferences designed to allow users to override the GTK+ theme settings, but only for the conversation history pane. This preference serves very little purpose anywhere but on Windows, so I removed it. I then made sure the Pidgin GTK+ Theme Control plugin could control the history area font. There were some objections about unconditionally removing this preference, so I compromised and made it available only on Windows, even though I fail to see why the plugin isn't sufficient to control this font.
In the end, I believe I accomplished my initial goal of making the preferences window fit on smaller screens, but I also managed to make it so the dialog still fits on an 800x600 screen. The new window measures 698 pixels wide and 492 pixels high in my configuration, which is a bit too big for 640x480, but will fit with plenty of room to spare on 800x600 and should fit pretty well on just about any netbook screen.
You can take a look at what the new window will look like with these pictures (sorry, but the order is backwards and I'm too lazy to fix it):
This will be in Pidgin 2.6.4 when we release it. Hopefully everyone enjoys the changes!
