Re: [Utopia] GNOME Power Manager "redesign"

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 17:23 -0400, Bryan Clark wrote:
> 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 :)

Cool, cheers.

> 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.

Yes, agreed.

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

Urm, okay, i like my colour ones better, but it's personal preference I
guess. Thats a little matter :-)

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

Yes, we are making quick progress now. :-)

> Here's what I'm assuming is how this system is designed to be used.
> 
>  * The target audience is normal users, not enterprise systems.

Agree, well, the gconf session settings could be controlled using
sabayon in a enterprise setting, but that's a while away.

>  * The notification area icon appears automatically if someone has a
> battery on their system.

Agree.

>  * Access to the preferences can be through a menu item or right click
> preferences from the icon

Agree.

>  * The primary use of the dialog is because ACPI is busted and you need
> to fix your suspend or lid close behavior

Or when you don't like the defaults...

>  * The secondary use of the dialog is for obsessive compulsive tweaking
> of the sleep time settings :-)

Yes, do you think we could make profiles for this and just let advanced
users use gconf? Or is it okay as it is?

>  * 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.  

Sounds like the colour thingiebobwatsit in the battstat applet - which
admittedly easy to use.

> 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.

I'm not keep on using custom GTK widgets... I'll have a think/play.

> Great work,

We are getting there quickly now. The UI is slowly coming together.

Thanks for your comments, appreciated.

Richard.