power button on panel

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday, December 6, 2011 17:09:26 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > * 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.

agreed, but even with proper art it is one more item in the panel and imho 
each item in that panel makes it look worse. we should really put the bar high 
when it comes to what we put by default there. suggested criterion:

* the item must require global access (from apps or from the home screen)
* the item must not be a duplicate of functionality elsewhere
* the item must be fault-tolerant to accidental presses
* the item must not interfere with the pull down functionality of the bar

this will leave less to distract the user, more room for what does need to be 
there and even room to add other things if need-be in the future (such as app-
specific features)

> > * 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.

apps need to do similar things anyways for things like auto-screen-off 
prevention. media players do it all the time. it's also very common in mobile 
apps.

> > * 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".

hibernate is unlikely to be supported; shutdown can be achieved with long-hold 
on the power button.

> 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.

yes ... 

my remaining concern is that this means that the user must always purposefully 
put the machine to sleep through a multi-step process. which means the common 
case takes longer just so we can make this less-common case more convenient. 

another thought: pressing the hardware button could lock the screen and put 
the lock screen into a "sleeping in N seconds" mode, with an item to drag to 
STOP it from sleeping automatically. so if you want it to sleep, hit the power 
button, forget about it. if you want it to ONLY lock, hit the power button and 
slide the sleep inhibitor.

this would make it optimized for the common case ("i'm done for now, let's put 
it away") while making the less common case easy to achieve?

--
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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