Re: Applets? [was Re: Planning for GNOME 3.0]

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 16:23 +0200, Tomasz Torcz wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 10:54:43PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > "Crack"
> > =======
> > 
> > Brightness applet
> > Inhibit Applet
> 
>   There will be often differences in opionions. I, for one, use above
> two applets very often. First, because changing brightness keyboard
> shortcut require two hands on my laptop, but operating mouse only one.
>   Second one, because I don't want my laptop suspending when I move it,
> and moving is easier with closed screen. And it's way faster to single click
> applet instead of diving into preferences menu or rightclicking on
> battery indicator and navigating from there.
>   One man's crack is another's basic functionality.

Note that "Crack" was in quotes. I think it's legitimate for advanced
users to want to configure their desktop in ways that simply would make
no sense to the majority of the population. I'd like to foster that and
extend to things that aren't just adding 24-pixel high controls to the
edge of the screen.

But we shouldn't confuse advanced user crack with normal customization.

Think about the inhibit applet from a design point of view. A common use
case that comes up for "close lid without suspending" is:

 User wants to listen to music on their laptop with the lid closed.
 (perhaps on a plane)

Is it conceivable that the answer we'd come up with for that is:

 Let's have an applet available in "Add to Panel" described as
 "Inhibit Applet: Allow user to inhibit automatic power saving"

- Owen