Re: [Usability] A battery applet...

[Sergey Udaltsov <sergey udaltsov gmail com>]

> Doesnt your PDA have its own battery indicator though? Sounds a bit
> weird to show it on the laptop or desktop machine's panel..?
Well, my one - does not. But I know one guy (Russian as well:) who is
going to add 'battery' capability to his plugged (over ppp) PocketPC -
so I assume there can be other people who want to see this kind of
info on their desktops.

> Stuff like network devices, removable storage devices (usb, firewire
> etc), modems (serial, bluetooth, usb I guess) - show icons when those
So, it really looks we got new entity here. Some kind of
gnome-hal-daemon - the interface between  HAL entities and the panel.
Ghm... Who would find some spare time to start hacking on it....

> devices are in use - and present a few useful menu entries on right
> click. And might show a galago-notification when they appear or
> disappear. "Wireless network is now running, network ID is 'GNOME'".

> For this reason I as a non-programmer think it might be a good idea to
> have some common mechanism that handles all these status icons and
Yeah, there should be some generic approach here - I agree. As a programmer.

>       * Battery: Just show the status and time remaining, figure out
>         what batteries to display and how, without bugging the user
Well, probably there should be some educated guess regarding common
cases (laptop, mouse, keyboard, UPS) - but still user should be able
to add additional monitors (for PDA, camera, car - whatever external
device indication is available)
 
> I guess this makes sense, right? I mean, I do not want to configure
> anything, as long as it is by any means possible to avoid. There's a lot
> of clever guesses programs can make. And when I override them, they just
> need to remember that. That would be awesome.
Yeah, your scenarios do make sense. Well, they do not cover more
complex situations - but there is no conflict here, there can always
be "Advanced options" or gconf entries or whatever...

Cheers,

Sergey