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To connect to my VPN, I seem to need to click where it says "OFF". And to disconnect, I click where it says "ON". This is just *wrong*, surely? Within an hour of posting http://twitter.com/#!/dwmw2/status/61914729697906688 I was confused by it again. Evolution reported an error connecting to a company mail server, and this is usually because I've fallen off the VPN. The NetworkManager applet doesn't even show me an icon indicating that I'm connected to the VPN any more. So I looked at the confusing ON/OFF thingy and clicked 'ON' before I realised what I was doing.... and thus disconnected myself from the VPN! I have heard people talking about these slide-switch things but not realised just how horrid they are. I'd also heard that they were supposed to be used only for *hardware* switches, but that they were being used inconsistently. This would seem to be an example of that too, since connecting to a VPN is *not* a hardware switch.
Yeah, I agree that these slide-switches are horrid and very confusing. I must admit that I didn't even recognize that the thing is a slide and thought that there were two buttons with on and off or something. In any case, one have to thing every time what ON/OFF state means (is is current state of state I want to activate?). I think checkboxes (or something) would do better job. (In reply to comment #0) > To connect to my VPN, I seem to need to click where it says "OFF". > And to disconnect, I click where it says "ON". This is just *wrong*, surely? > In Windows, we used to shutdown computer with 'Start' button :P > The NetworkManager applet doesn't even show me an icon indicating that I'm > connected to the VPN any more. the indicator applet shows a white dot (circle) before VPN connection for me when connected.
Don't think discussion of GNOME 3 UI conventions in this context is productive. It's not like Colin and I as GNOME Shell package maintainers in Fedora are going to make non-upstream changes to what the controls look like, especially not in just one place. The proper place to discuss this is upstream (like on the #gnome-design channel on GimpNET IRC).
As I understand it, the GNOME 3 UI convention is to use these horrid sliders only for hardware stuff. The VPN is not a hardware thing, but is using the slider. Surely that's a simple bug, not a discussion of the UI convention?