Re: [Utopia] GNOME Power Manager "redesign"

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Hi Richard ~

I like the reworked dialog.  I talked to David a little about some
changes I think could be good so I'm passing it on to you now :)

The one notification area icon is a good idea.  A UPS is only possibly
interesting when your power has failed, so showing an icon for it at any
other time is superfluous.  The mouse wireless icon is only interesting
when it's nearing a failure point, pick the best value and display it
when the mouse battery reaches that.

The icons you have look pretty good, I'd recommend keeping them simple,
something really similar to notibat [1].  

Oh, and I saw the new compacted tooltip in the thread, that looks good
too.

Here's what I'm assuming is how this system is designed to be used.

 * The target audience is normal users, not enterprise systems.
 * The notification area icon appears automatically if someone has a
battery on their system.
 * Access to the preferences can be through a menu item or right click
preferences from the icon
 * The primary use of the dialog is because ACPI is busted and you need
to fix your suspend or lid close behavior
 * The secondary use of the dialog is for obsessive compulsive tweaking
of the sleep time settings :-)
 * Similar secondary use is tweaking UPS settings

I wanted to get an idea of what it is you're trying to make and how you
picture it being used so we can figure out the best way to design each
piece.

A total aside, David had asked me to look at this at the beginning of
the week and I just did a quick little thing to try and work out some
confusing parts of most power dialogs.  You're using the "Setting" thing
for this part, but what I did was not to create profiles or different
columns to separate the battery and power.

When you adjust the sleep timing for battery vs. power your power
timings are always greater than your battery.  So I made a little
drawing of what you could do to visual this to the person.  You indicate
in a slider which one is battery and which is power and allow them to
drag each color to the level they'd like.  

Take a look:
http://gnome.org/~clarkbw/designs/power/sleep%20time.png

This is probably pretty hard to create in GTK+, so I'm not expecting to
see it, but something like this is how I'd get around that combobox
thing.

Great work,
~ Bryan

[1] http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/images/notibat.png