[PATCH] Turn Powerdevil suspend notification into a dialog

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On September 22, 2009, David Nolden wrote:
> For sure, the user feels less confused when he's disturbed by a dialog,
>  then when he's disturbed by the shutdown of his computer.

again, where's the evidence that this is even happening?

what i've been hearing from users and seeing while observing usage:

* the power notifications happen too often already ("Critical" power level is 
a bit too arbitrary on many systems right now)

* that the powering down notification doesn't last long enough (easy to solve)

* the the buttons are too small to hit in a short period of time (also easy to 
solve)

where is the "my computer turns off and i didn't know it because the 
notification didn't let me know this"?

> > That needs to be fixed, regardless. Introducing another way of notifying
> >  the user of important system events is not a solution but creates
> >  inconsistency and makes this problem even worse.
> >
> > I'm not saying that this piece of user interaction (critical suspend)
> > can't be improved. Replacing it with a dialog is just the wrong
> > direction.
> 
> I agree that it would probably be better if this was handled somehow
> consistently. 

so lets do that.

> But the result would be something similar to a modal dialog
> anyway, as it _must_ disturb the users workflow. 

you don't need a modal anything to get user attention. and no, you do NOT need 
to FORCE a disturbance upon the user. i want to know when i need to take 
action, but i don't want to have what i'm doing interrupted forceably for that 
information to be passed on. the only things that piss me off are things i 
can't control, such as disk checks on start up (as one example). i am not 
unique in this way.

> Maybe a very prominent
> colored, flashing and non-disappearing popup somewhere near the panel would
> work as well.

well, colored and flashing is probably unnecessary. non-disappearing is easy; 
large is easy, too.

> But dialogs have their advantages too: Everyone notices them,
> and everyone knows how to use them.

that's a fallacy. people who know how to use a computer know what a dialog 
looks like because they've seen them before. but there is nothing that says 
that they will use THIS dialog in the way we are hoping to.

see my other email why i think this would be very likely to backfire badly.

-- 
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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