Application settings aren't easy to read and don't give a good overview
The application settings suffer from a number of related structural issues:
- At times, they's very noisy and hard to read (screenshot). Settings are divided up into different sections (which are of limited use), each of which have descriptions. The accompanying information swamps the actual settings.
- Sometimes the settings for an app are quite empty (screenshot). Apart from looking bad, this is also ambiguous - it might not be obvious what the lack of content means.
- The default handlers section exposes technical details whose meaning is unclear. This contributes to the noise problem, is repetitious, and is often of limited utility (screenshot).
My proposal for how to resolve these issues is to:
- Always include certain key permissions in the panel, in order to make it easier to compare apps, to be clearer about which permissions the app doesn't have, and to ensure that the panel isn't empty.
- Reorganise the settings into fewer sections which are more meaningful to users ("required" and "optional" - see #452 (closed)).
- As part of the above, move all the file and link handlers into a dialog.
There are mockups for this, which might not be 100% perfect, but which I'm very happy to iterate on.