Re: [gpm] Power Manager Upgrade

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 00:09 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 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. 
<snip>
>  http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/g-p-m-prefer-power-savings.png

You can't physically put all the options in one page and expect it to
fit on 800x600 - see below. :-)

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

I'm not sure. With the 2.16 code I asked my girlfriend set up the
brightness value when on ac and battery (she is my "is it sane" test).

She set the slider on AC, then she changed the tab to battery, then
switched the tab back to AC then to battery again. Then she changed the
battery slider.

I asked her why she did that, and she said she wanted to compare the ac
brightness value against the battery value so she could set the
brightness lower on battery power.

I'm guessing my solution of putting the options of the same page helps
her case, but you are correct, maybe this shouldn't be in the UI.

> > 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. 

Sure, understood.

> (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.) 

No, because I find myself changing this if I find myself thinking "shit,
this is a two hour tutorial, and I have no ac-outlet" when I want the
scaling to kick in at the start of being on battery rather than near the
end.

I think we need some proper use-cases for this.

> So one suggestion is to punt all these extra settings that take up UI
> space to gTweakUI instead
> 
>  http://gtweakui.sourceforge.net/

Not keen on this idea. I don't have this program installed, and I'm not
sure the correct solution is "punt the settings to <randomapp>".

> 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.

Sure, but I think we should think carefully about trading simplicity in
the UI with user power. I also have strong opinions on the
over-simplification of GNOME, so I'm glad we're having this discussion.

So we start from a blank sheet of paper (hypothetically) : what settings
should we expose in a power management UI?

I would appreciate if everyone could comment and tell me what they think
of the old and new UI's and if they have any suggestions.

Thanks.

Richard.