Re: [Utopia] GNOME Power Manager "redesign"

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 18:44 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> * One notification area icon, displaying either battery status for
> laptops (like the old battery icon
> http://gnome-power.sourceforge.net/images/battery-all.png) or the UPS
> for servers. For desktops no icon would be needed. Multiple laptop
> batteries would be shown as one "virtual" battery with the charge
> averaged and the time remaining added.

It might be nice to show additional icons when batteries are low.  For
example, I don't normally care about the battery in my wireless mouse
except when it's low.  I'm not exactly sure which icon you'd want to use
in this case, though.

> * A multiline tooltip when hovering over the aforementioned icon.
> (DavidZ's ascii art, not mine:-)
>  +--------------------------------------+
>  | Running on [Power Adapter|Batteries] | <-+ plural only if two laptop
>  |                                      |   | batteries are inserted
>  | Laptop batteries:        42% charged | <-- 
>  |          2 hours 5 minutes remaining |     
>  |                                      | 
>  | Logitech M600 mouse:     14% charged |
>  |                                      |
>  | APC UPS:                100% charged |
>  |           30 minutes emergency power |
>  +--------------------------------------+

Big tooltips will look bad, and normally you don't do this sort of
formatting in a tooltip.  This seems to me like something to stick in a
dialog that you get to from a right-click menu.  Including some
information in a tooltip is a good idea.

(Right now, the gnome battery applet is displaying for me:

        System is running on AC power
        Battery charged (100%)
        
which seems like a nice, concise tooltip which gets across all the
neccessary info.)

> The "power modes" combobox would only display if batteries are present,
> as too would the UPS tab (and lines on tooltip) with UPS hardware. The
> "laptop lid" options would only show if the machine has such hardware
> too.

The screenshots for the preferences look good, but I'm not sure the
light bulb hint things are very useful.  "Options are settings that you
may wish to change."  Well duh. :)

Joe