Re: [Usability] A battery applet...

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

On Wed, 2004-12-15 at 16:10 +0000, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> Yeah, my mouse can (and it is because of this fact I started the whole story:).
> So, we are talking about several indicators, generally speaking: PDA
> battery status, wireless mouse (keyboard) battery status, UPS status,
> laptop battery(es) status (ok, unified) etc. In this regard, we'll
> need automatic icon choosing depending on the device type, won't we?

Doesnt your PDA have its own battery indicator though? Sounds a bit
weird to show it on the laptop or desktop machine's panel..?

> So, this question is hanging in the air, so far. At the moment I do
> not know any gnome hal-related daemon which would be represented on
> the panel...

Yea, it doesnt exist AFAIK.

But there are many things like this that

      * Depend on notifications / hotplug etc
      * Would show an icon or status indicator on the panel when present
      * Are not needed there if the device is not in use or not present

Stuff like network devices, removable storage devices (usb, firewire
etc), modems (serial, bluetooth, usb I guess) - show icons when those
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
indicators somehow. Some programmer might know a better way to do this.
But I speak from the functionality point of view:

      * Battery: Just show the status and time remaining, figure out
        what batteries to display and how, without bugging the user

      * Networking: Try DHCP in the fastest device first, then try
        wavelan if present, try first access point you can find, dhcp
        and use it if it works. Show a list of all access points
        available on right click (wiht "Other..." to add your own
        (hidden) essid). 

        _Remember_ the ones I explicitely choose and _always_ use those
        later if they are present (based on mac address or something,
        essid's are too similar naturally :)) Whatever I do, try to
        always remember that and restore those settings later.. 

        Scenario: I go home, wavelan finds the essids there (I have 3 in
        range), figures out one of them is the same access point I chose
        before (mac address) and just uses the settings. First time it
        connected to my neighbour's one (hard to guess that well :) but
        I changed it once and it doesnt do that again. If both wired
        ethernet and wavelan exist, again choose for example the faster
        one. And if I happen to change that, always remember it later.
        
      * Etc..

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.

//Tuomas