Re: [gpm] Power Manager Upgrade

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 20:09 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> No, that's not flaming. The reason it was changed was that as more
> functionality was added it was difficult to keep the "on Ac" / "on
> Battery" list due to space requirements and code complexity. 

You know, maybe there's just too many options in the UI. Let's see

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gpm-ui-regression/gpm-1.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gpm-ui-regression/gpm-2.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gpm-ui-regression/gpm-3.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gpm-ui-regression/gpm-4.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gpm-ui-regression/gpm-5.png

this is from CVS HEAD as of tonight. This is the 2.16 dialog

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/g-p-m-prefer-power-savings.png

I'm pretty user interaction designers are terrified about that
regression.

> I agree we could do some cleanup and higification, but I think we need
> to stay with the "task" based tabs rather than the "state" based tabs.

Why? In 2.16 you had an overview of all the settings. Now you have to
switch tabs and hunt around to see all the settings for the mode you're
in. How is that an improvement? That I can choose "power processor
profile"? Pretty sure, btw, that term is meaningless to lots of people
and personally I have a hard time finding out when I want to tweak a
setting like that. 

(Mostly I think the CPU frequency scaling (which it turns out that
"power processor profile" really is) should just follow the "prefer
power savings over performance" setting and maybe depend on how much
juice you got left if you are running on battery.) 

So one suggestion is to punt all these extra settings that take up UI
space to gTweakUI instead

 http://gtweakui.sourceforge.net/

Then you can also provide UI for all the extra options you have in
gconf.  Think about this way; most "power users" (or momentum users,
whatever) love such things and if g-p-m starts exposing stuff there
gTweakUI is more likely to get more exposure and long term it might help
the options disaster we are currently experiencing in GNOME (sadly it's
not only g-p-m that suffers from this terrible syndrome). In fact, g-p-m
might be an awesome poster child for this.

Thanks for considering.

     David