Re: [Usability] A battery applet...

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

   On Wed, 2004-12-15 at 14:28 +0000, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> > 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
> Total amount of juice in the battery case is absolutely meaningless
> thing IMHO. If I have 99% of the laptop battery and 1% of the mouse
> battery - I can run things for a long time (probably, switching to the
> touchpad very soon). But the other way around - I should immediately
> save my work and do "suspend". In both cases showing %50 does not make
> any sense. Also, 1% of the PDA battery should not really bother
> desktop user too much (well, it should - but it is not critical to the
> desktop functionality).

Oh, so your (cordless) mouse can report its battery state? Yes, in that
case, yep. It should show all those weird batteries as separate, but
whatever batteries are used together (two laptop batteries for example)
should just be combined together, and it should simply show them all
then, to avoid the need to set things up manually.

> Well, I absolutely agree with this point. I just do not know whether
> current panel (notification area?) architecture allows to create
> applets (tray icons?) "on demand" (from the system, HAL side) easily.
> Is there any example for something of that kind? It would look
> reasonable - if the applet/icon appear automatically - only when it is
> really necessary.

I guess some kind of a "gnome hal-thingy daemon" could take care of
that? However, I am not a coder and I wont attempt to be one, so someone
who knows the technicals can probably come up with a better idea.

//T

-- 
Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>