Re: [Usability] A battery applet...

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert novell com>]

On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 20:29 +0000, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> Hello
> 
> There is some work going in the HAL project, related to the devices
> having batteries. First result of this work is exposed in the patch
> submitted to the HAL specs (see the "battery" section).
> 
> In a word, any device having battery provices the "battery" capability
> and exposes some set of battery.* properties. So, there is a plot to
> create some general purpose battery applet (ghm, I am not saying I
> will do it tomorrow:) - derived from the Battery Charge Monitor. User
> will be presented with the choise of all the devices having battery
> (automatic icon pickup, of course) - so the applet will indicate the
> status of the device chosen by the user.

There is one problem with this "present choice to user" stuff. We should
just try to be creative and try guessing the right thing. What users
care is "how much longer can this thing run without AC power?". What
devices would there be to choose from? I mean, just combine them all and
show the total amount of juice left. (Maybe you mean this with the
"automatic icon pickup, I am not sure) - but really, do we need a
setting at all?

Same problem we have for network applets and quite a bit of others. The
applet should just check some device statistics and make an educated
guess: if there are packets on eth0 but not on eth1, it is just better
to show stats for eth0. Then continue monitoring the others too, since
the user might swap for wavelan later.. The network monitor might at
that point show a bubble notification about "wavelan link active, ip
n.n.n.n" and just do the right thing and start monitoring eth1 from then
on, and also would change the ethernet icon to a small wavelan icon /
signal indicator.

It's great that we are having HAL stuff and the notifications. The right
thing would indeed be to just show applets for things that exist on the
computer: gnome-bluetooth would start automatically when such a device
exists, network applet would show once link gets up, a battery meter
would appear on machines that have a battery, etc etc.. There is no need
to _add_ those by hand.

//Tuomas

-- 
Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert novell com>