April 23rd, 2010 byAs I explained on Wednesday, we’re replacing Ubuntu’s notification area with a consistent set of menus. As part of that transition, we need to adapt system components that have previously been using the notification area.
One of the simplest of these belongs to Gnome Power Manager, and displays the charge status for the batteries in devices connected to your computer — the computer itself, any wireless mouse, phone, and so on.
In Ubuntu 10.04, Gnome Power Manager has already been patched to use a custom status menu (“application indicator”). So, probably, not much will change when it shuffles over to the system area. But we’re still interested in feedback on the design and any improvements we can make.
Once you’ve checked out the full battery status menu specification, we’d be glad to have your comments either here or on the Ayatana mailing list.
The toolkit
52 Responseshide comments
Good news, everyone.
Sorry for my intrusion, and beg my pardon, if I over set your plans,
but I’ve worked at some project a couple months already,
and I’ve released first version of public release recently,
and I’ve found this post, so would like to announce it here – http://live.gnome.org/BatteryStatus
I also can’t wait fixing this bug – https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/indicator-application/+bug/541858
so I could add label with battery charge/time information for indicator as I did it for applet.
About CPU frequency – I’ve read comments here after code/package has been uploaded,
and I know who Matthew Garrett is (his presentations about power management are really awesome),
but if you don’t like and don’t want CPU scaling, you can simply just disable it
(via gconf – /apps/battery_status/show_powermode, or via applet’s “Show” -> “Power Modes”),
however I think about how such kind of power management could be improved.
About power state of other devices – I’ve tried to make G-P-M show percentage
of 3 RF mices, one bluetooth keyboard and couple phones -
looks like that UPower/G-P-M just can’t provide power state of such devices,
so I haven’t hardware for testing and implementing such feature at this moment.
About battery dialog – I’ve (reconsider and re-)implemented it,
because I think, that user really should have easy and useful way to get full info about battery,
but in a compact elegant way.
About code’s quality – I know, that it’s not at good state,
but I have a lot of plans for refactoring it.
About design and usability – I will be very appreciate
for any well-reasoned comments and ideas from Canonical/Ubuntu designers
about how this project can be improved.
Any [constructive] feedback are welcome.