Re: Proposal for inclusion in Desktop: GNOME Power Manager

[Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>]

Quoting Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>:

> The icon is configurable to whether it stays in the tray whilst
> charging / discharging, low (still need to fully code this), not full --
> so I guess the sanest option from a usability perspective would to just
> show the icon when charging or discharging, or when a device is low.
>
> I went against the applet-as-notifier type design, as g-p-m is a session
> daemon, running once per user. A user could add more than one applet
> (and have contention) or not add any at all (and have no
> power-management) -- plus I figured the user was being "notified" of the
> battery state.

I am concerned about 2 things: information overload and redundant 
notification.

GPM should also require no display settings. It should either communicate
through the battstat applet if it is running on the panel, or in some other
non-obtrusive way. If we have two separate things showing battery power in the
core desktop then we've obviously done something wrong.

Ideally, to my mind:
- Battstat should display the battery power all the time, as it does now
- Clicking on battstat should bring up a detailed view of every battery known
to the system (this may also be available in other ways). If GPM is online, it
uses that information, else it only returns the status of batteries known to
HAL.
- Battstat will notify you when you're laptop is running low
- GPM will notify you when any other battery is running low (perhaps via
Battstat).
- Battstat will be able to run without GPM
- GPM will be able to run without battstat.

I don't want to kill battstat, because it is an applet, and GPM is not. 
Lots of
this comes back to my previous discussion on hardware based applets and 
session
based applets. However, we may just have to work around it.

Perhaps someone with artistic and design talent can do some sort of mockup of
how they think it should work?

--d