Battfink for GNOME 2.6

[Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster Sun COM>]

Hey there,

Okay, I guess this mail is really just another hope that some one might
have some spare time, and feel like hacking on a pretty small module.

Battfink is a simple dialog for your energy saving preferences.
Currently it shows the following -

Display
  [] Enable power management for displays
  Standby after    [    [<>] minutes
  Suspend after    [    [<>] minutes
  Switch off after [    [<>] minutes

Battery
  [] Show status icon in panel notification area
  [] Show label with icon

The Display section pretty much mirrors the user interface in the
current xscreensaver properties dialog, which detects if you X server is
capable of DPMS or not.

The Battery section currently uses eggtrayicon API, and embeds a little
animating icon into the notifcation area.

So, here are my concerns for it's inclusion -

	o Duplicated functionality with xscreensaver
		- Ideally, I'd love someone to write a simple
		  screensaver, and integrate their work into
		  battfink. I personally believe xscreensaver is
		  overkill, but I know others might have a differing
		  opinion

	o Status icon guidelines/eggtrayicon API
		- We still haven't come up with a definitive idea of
		  what the status icon should do, and how it should 
		  interact.

	o Session saving
		- Not really sure how this is supposed to work. If it
		  was an applet, then the panel is responsible for it, 
		  but since it's a standalone applet, it needs to be
		  saved into its own session [which might be buggy atm].
	
	o Implementation
		- It's currently using the bonobo_generic_factory_new
		  and probably making it over complicated. I imagine
		  it should be simpler than this.

	o CPU
		- How CPU intensive is the animation? I've cut the
		  timeouts considerably, but haven't checked to see if
		  we got the optimum timing.

	o ACPI/APM
		- Battstat has had a lot more exposure, porting and
	          testing. It would be nice not to lose this work.

So, I guess that's a tentative inclusion for 2.6. I've just spent a
while looking at the battstat code and it is incredibly yucky [close to
struct members in battstat.h].

Anyone feel like picking this up, as I'm not entirely sure I have time
[1]

Glynn


[1] Plus I'd rather spent any free time working on website/board stuff
    right now