update on active screen locker

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 31.01.2012 13:45, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> hi :)
>
> on the airplane back home today, i finished up the integration of sleep and
> shutdown controls into the lock screen. it works rather nicely imho ...

After having used the new locker for a while, I agree that it works really well! 
I don't use the software shutdown button at all anymore since the locker offers 
all I need (except for reboot after an upgrade, which is another story).

> as promised, when first locked a countdown begins (~5 seconds long) after which
> the device is put to sleep. touching the slider during the countdown cancels
> the the sleep.

The system works well in general! There are just some details that still need a 
little love:

- After the timer reaches zero, the slider goes back to the start and the text 
reads "Sleeping in 5 seconds" again. Instead, it should not go back to the start 
until after resuming and should just read "Sleep" after the timer goes to zero.
- If I tap the slider while it's moving, it returns to the starting position 
instead of remaining where I tapped it. This feels strange when I want to 
"accelerate" the countdown.

- When I activate the shutdown slider, the screen goes black, then the lock 
screen appears again for a short time before the system actually shuts down.

> this should take care of all of the use cases we had while optimizing for the
> common case.

Agreed.
Now we only need to remember to integrate a reboot function in our update 
manager so updates actually take effect (otherwise they would never do for users 
who never shut their device down).

> device capabilties are taken into consideration ->  if sleep or shutdown is not
> available (or disabled via configuration, e.g. kiosk) then those features are
> not available.

Cool!

> to test, make sure you have the latest kscreenlocker from the screenlocker
> branch in kde-workspace as well as kde-plasma-artwork.
>
>
> that's the good news. now some implementation notes:
>
> i wasn't overly happy with the visuals. the shutdown label and slider
> overlapped the vines on the top right. so i removed the vine. the lock paper
> is therefore a little more  plain but it looks a lot nicer imho with the new
> bits of chrome that are there. Marco: feel free to weigh in on that decision.

The screen looks absolutely fine to me, except for the slider visuals and the 
countdown text being too close to the edge.

> the other reason i'm not tooooo happy with the look is that i just used the
> regular sliders from Plasma components. that could certainly be better imho.
> the sleep slider is full and the shutdown slider was empty in their default
> states, which was odd, so i rotated (!) the shutdown slider. perhaps something
> better could be achieved but it will take someone with more artistic skills to
> apply some efforts there.

I agree with Marco that the arrow sliders from the original Activity Switcher 
would probably work better here. But perhaps they need a little tweaking to work 
perfectly here. We'll have to see them in action.

> this will need some user testing to make sure it's clear to people what is
> happening and how to sleep (or not) and shutdown the device, if it is easy
> enough to trigger (right now you have to move the the slider to a value of
> less than 5; the sliders range from 0 to 100 internally..)

I just conducted some "extensive" user testing (n=1 ;) ). The result was that 
the participant understood what happened and was able to shut the device down 
using the slider. He said he got the clue when the slider was moving automatically.
However, as expected, he was confused when the text read "Sleeping in 5 seconds" 
after resuming. But that's a bug that should be easy to fix, right? ;)

And by the way: Can we suppress the notification "The screen is being locked"? 
Since it appears right before the lock screen, its informative value is close to 
zero. Even more so after you resumed, since it's not even relevant anymore but 
still adds one to the message counter and has to be closed manually.

Cheers,
Thomas