power button on panel

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi ...

time to discuss my favourite part of the UI! :) 

from the conf call, where the conversation did not have a chance to actually 
reach resolution, the use story for the lock screen button was this:

"Mary is in a meeting and has her Plasma Active tablet with her. She starts a 
download that will take some time. The meeting comes to a close and Mary 
leaves to her next destination, but wants the download to continue while in 
transit. This makes putting the tablet to full sleep not a desireable option. 
Instead, she just wants to lock the screen to prevent input."

(whether or not this is a valid use case is probably a first question ... but 
let's just assume it is indeed valid and important enough to adjust the 
primary UI as a result for the sake of this discussion.)

my objections to having a software button on the panel to support this use 
case are:

* the button on the panel looks something horrible.
* there are hardware buttons for this kind of thing.
* there are other ways of achieving similar results.

some possible approaches could be:

* have the hardware button always bring up the choices dialog and turn it into 
a multi-step process always. right now, short-hold-on-hardware-power is 
usually linked to sleep. we could even do something fancy to keep "fast sleep" 
easy enough by interpretting a double-short-power-tab as "go to sleep"

* we already activate and automatically lock the screen after 5 minutes 
without user activity; this could be shortened. it could even be shortened 
perhaps only when the user is sitting at the home screen (preventing having to 
deal with it locking quickly when in an app)

* we could implement "sleep prevention"; we can already suspend various power 
management triggers on demand thanks to powerdevil, so if a download is 
ongoing, for instance, we could inhibit automatic sleep and instead just lock 
the screen

* sleep could be trigggered from the lock screen, with hardware power button 
always locking at first. we could put a drag-item-to-sleep-the-device on the 
lock screen. or interpret a tap on the hardware powerbutton when locked to 
mean "go to sleep" (meaning a double tap on the hardware button would first 
lock then sleep the device).

as it is, the software power button feels a little like a simple answer that 
comes with a compromise on the elegance of that area of the UI. if we simply 
deny ourselves that simple answer as an option, we are sure to find a better 
answer (or so one would hope :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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