Re: [Usability] A battery applet...

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

On Wed, 2004-12-15 at 22:45 +0000, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:

> >       * Battery: Just show the status and time remaining, figure out
> >         what batteries to display and how, without bugging the user
> Well, probably there should be some educated guess regarding common
> cases (laptop, mouse, keyboard, UPS) - but still user should be able
> to add additional monitors (for PDA, camera, car - whatever external
> device indication is available)

Yeah, but well, how realistic it is that I want to worry about the
battery of my digital camera the short time it is connected to my
laptop? Or my PDA. What it could do, is show a notification when the
battery is *low*, or if, say, an IPod battery is fully charged, so I
know I can unplug it. 

What I am after, is that there's just _so much_ of information
everywhere today, that it is not possible to follow everything. What
seems to be cool these days is searching, intelligently finding the
relevant parts of information from the huge pile of data. Think Beagle,
Dashboard, Google, Evolution / Firebird filters, vfolders, etc etc.. 

Why shouldnt we use the same philosophy on the desktop? I am mostly
interested about the battery when it is about to run out. I am
interested in things when something happens. This is why there's Galago
to do the notifications. I used to run "Gkrellm" system monitor (the app
that shows all the system information you can think of in a neat
buttonbar) - but when I want to just get my work done, I dont want to
see all these wiggling indicators distracting myself. I want a clean
desktop that lets me know if something happens that needs my attention.

So in that sense, there is no need to show all that information all the
time. When a battery is low, or a network connection fails / starts or
there's a new bluetooth device, show a notification for sure. Maybe show
the battery indicator for the mouse battery when it is getting low, so I
can keep an eye on it. But we should not automatically assume the user
wants to see everything all the time. GConf can be then used if we geeks
want that - I dont think it is good for the default behaviour.

> > I guess this makes sense, right? I mean, I do not want to configure
> > anything, as long as it is by any means possible to avoid. There's a lot
> > of clever guesses programs can make. And when I override them, they just
> > need to remember that. That would be awesome.
> Yeah, your scenarios do make sense. Well, they do not cover more
> complex situations - but there is no conflict here, there can always
> be "Advanced options" or gconf entries or whatever...

Yeah, preferably gconf stuff you can "tweak" as a power user - I mean,
the less config UI there is and the better the app is in "just do the
right thing" the less unnecessary "configuration" I need to do after
installing linux on a new computer for example. Stuff should just work,
and the desktop should be clean and polished.

Best,

//Tuomas