power button on panel

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

> -----Original Message-----
> 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.)

I'm still convinced there are valid use cases for locking instead of
putting to sleep. Not only an ongoing download, but pretty much anything
that should continue to work in the background uninterrupted while the
device is put away.

> my objections to having a software button on the panel to support this
use
> case are:
> 
> * the button on the panel looks something horrible.

Imo currently it does so mainly because it does not fit the theme of the
other icons. That could be fixed.

> * 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"

Imo not the most elegant solution, but okay (with the "double-tap to
sleep"). I've actually configured my device that way by setting the button
event to "log out" and it works okay for me (but would be a lot nicer with
the double-tap).

> * 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)

I don't think that's a good solution. Something that annoyed me about both
my smartphones is that they lock (and turn the screen off) much too
quickly in the default setup. E.g. when I use them for navigation, I don't
always interact with them but still want to see what happens.
Restricting it to the home screen would solve that problem, but then you'd
always have to go back to the home screen when you want to put your device
away and switch back to your application when you take it out again.

> * 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

This could theoretically work, but in that case all applications that
users might want to continue running while not actively using the device
would need to specifically activate sleep prevention, right? Though it
would be elegant, I doubt it will be feasible.

> * 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).

Hmmm... I think both ideas are good.
But then I'd also want a "drag item to hibernate (if available)" and "drag
item to shut down".
I still don't think the battery icon is the right place for switching off
your device and I am sure users will want to have a way to shut down
(someone even mentioned that in the forum).
I generally think this might be a good solution because:
- You switch your device off or "semi-off" (aka sleep) with the power
button, which is intuitive
- You can still easily lock the screen with the press of a button if you
want to put the device away for a few minutes.

So yes, I think removing the software button and placing all on the
hardware button (whether with a combined lock / logout screen or with the
current dialog) is a good idea. I just do not recommend taking too many
options away from the user.