Re: [gpm] Re: Gnome 2.16 Module Proposal: GNOME Power Manager

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 4/9/06, Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com> wrote:
> On 4/9/06, Corey Burger <corey burger gmail com> wrote:

> > I completely disagree. There are a few good reasons why an icon should
> > be displayed all the time
> >
> > 1. What state the battery is in is always relevant. Power is the
> > single most important thing on a laptop. Without it, you are going
> > nowhere.
>
> Wrong. It only matters when you're getting so low you are in danger of
> losing work, or when the status changes, or in a couple other corner
> cases which can be designed for.

Wrong. ;-)  It matters unless the battery is fully charged and the
laptop is plugged in.  IMNSHO anyway.

> It is *not* the most important thing- the most important thing is whatever work
> I'm actually *doing*.

Agreed.

> I strongly recommend reading 'Designing From Both Sides of the
> Screen', where one of the simple design heuristics is to make software
> that acts like a butler (or in this case, a chauffeur.) As you drive
> around town, does your chauffeur say 'by the way sir, the gas tank is
> now 59% full.' (minutes pass) 'oh, now 58% full sir.' No. If your
> chauffeur did that, you'd fire him for being an irritating idiot. A
> good chauffeur tells you 'Sir, the tank is very nearly empty- shall I
> find a station?', and a great chauffeur asks you once 'how early would
> you like me to warn you about the gas, sir?' and then remembers that
> in the future. When you pull the plug out of the wall, I mean, when
> you come upon the sign that says 'huge desert- no gas for a long way',
> a good chauffeur says 'Sir, we only have enough gas for 299 miles at
> current consumption- would you like me to turn around?'

The analogy is somewhat off -- having the icon showing is not the same
as it constantly popping up dialog windows saying "Your battery is
down to 58% full, sir".  The applet showing is more like the gas gauge
on your car that you can check whenever you want but doesn't interrupt
your normal driving.

> A good chauffeur, of course, does allow you to ask 'how much gas do we
> have?' whenever you get nervous, and admittedly we don't have a great
> way of doing that right now when the icon is purely in notification
> mode. It would be better to figure that out, though, than to
> needlessly put the information on the screen all the time.

This part of the analogy seems more appropriate to me.  I'd be fine
with a compromise of some sort that didn't have it showing all the
time but made it easily (and discoverably) queryable.


Just my random $0.02,
Elijah