'Settings' menu in DC desktop

Feature Proposal
1

I sill can’t update my DC Electron destop 1.58.2 (by people reasons, not technical), so maybe part of the following or even all of it is fixed already…

Actual behavior

Currently the right click on account icon end then selecting ‘Settings’ brings the menu, where each item make changes to:

  • Edit profile - particular account
  • Chats and Media - particular account
  • Notification - whole app
  • Appearance - whole app
  • Add second device - particular account (probably - not tested yet)
  • Connectivity - shows info on particular account
  • Advanced - changes on particular account

It’s not clear at all to guess right now, do i.e. notification setting works on the whole app or per profile.

Expected behavior

Maybe it should be separated on two different menus?

  1. account settings (Edit profile, Chats and Media, Add second device, Connectivity, Advanced), which should be accessible in account’ second level menu under the ‘Settings’; or these items may be placed to account first level menu, which now contains ‘Mute Notifications’ etc.

  2. global desktop app settings (containing Notification and Appearance), which should be in top menu under ‘File’

BTW ‘gear’ button on the bottom of account bar looks definetely like ‘global settings’, not like ‘currently selected account settings’.

If right click as a way to bring account settings menu on account icon in account bar is not enough, maybe also bring it with double click?

1 Like
2

The majority of this also applies to other DC clients (Android, iOS).

3

thank you for your thoughts!

it is on purpose, that there is exactly one settings dialog.

and that consistent on all platforms.

Delta Chat, as many other apps, sorts settings by area/keyword, not by its hierarchy/scope. the latter is just not known to the average user, so they would have to learn and understand before using settings dialogs. also hierarchy/scope is subject to change (eg. some years ago we had more “global” options). most user do not really care or have question at all, so no need to raise them.

however, as a rule of thumb, the settings are per-profile settings. there are a few exceptions, eg. mentioned appearance [1] and some global notification settings [2] - but they do not justify another dialog with all its UX disadvantages, as searching for a setting, maybe adding cross-links, cluttering UI, adding complexity - this is not the style of Delta Chat :slight_smile:

so, splitting settings or adding more headlines or so, is a non-goal currently

  1. for appearance settings, it makes sense to have them per-profile as well, it is just not done) ↩︎

  2. for notification settings, also see oder discussion at Notify on mention ↩︎

4

That is an interesting design philosophy and I can see the advantages. There are however on DeltaTouch also per-profile settings accessed by swiping the profile left or right. It took me a while to find those, partly because I thought I had already found the per-profile settings.

5

DeltaTouch is an independent development currently, same for ArcaneChat and others. while all share the same chatmail-core-library, they may have other concepts.

that you did not find the per-profile settings in DeltaTouch kind of underlines that a settings-split causes friction, and is indeed another argument against

6

Fair. @lk108 actually told me about the swipe menu; there are also advantages to being able to manage profiles fom the profile list.

7

I thik average user uses single account only, so there are no questions.

With current menu structure, you make me learn how i works :slight_smile: Only after some experiments I got a clue.

Maybe add section with header ‘Global’ to the same menu, and move ‘Notification’ and ‘Appearance’ to it?

Or just rename them to '‘Global Notification’ and ‘Global Appearance’?

It will keep the current structure, but will inform user on effect area.

If those two will be marked as global - it would be easy to guess that other items are account-specific.

8

I’d like to mention that this was not a design decision by me, but just a lack of capacity to work on my ToDo list which contained the item to make it available in the settings page as well (not sure if this makes me look better or rather the opposite :sweat_smile:). Took the opportunity to finally add it just now. @Minim

9

BTW - I’m sure it’s not (logical) split causes friction. I’ts just some usual non-obvious decision in UI design.

May be actually useful as a way to hide sacred proxy settings … :ogre:

10

I’ll look forward to seeing how it now works. No worries, tho, it worked, and perfection is the enemy of progress etc..