power management settings mockup

[Sebastian Kügler]

Powerdevil is under way into kdebase, and it will be accompanied with a plasma 
applet for quick interaction with the user. Powerdevil itself consists of a 
kded agent that manages switching profiles and all the stuff that needs a 
daemon, a kcontrol module to setup everything, a plasma dataengine (that's 
been merged into the powermanagement engine by Dario earlier today). The 
remaining bit then is the Plasma applet. We decided to extend the battery 
applet for this.

As it's a fairly visible part in the user experience, I'd like to get some 
feedback on the initial design of the applet. For the applet, we found out 
some plumbing in libplasma is useful, there's a patch pending that'll make 
implementing the following bits quite a bit easier and less prone to error and 
code duplication. http://reviewboard.vidsolbach.de/r/182/ -- I hope this gets 
in quickly (hint hint hint). 


The battery applet will be extended with a popup, much like the clocks pop up 
a calendar, it will pop up a small config dialog that gives immediate access 
to some setting. The purpose of this dialog is quickly change some power 
settings at runtime and to give some information about the state of the 
machine wrt power management.

The configuration dialog should make it easy to
- know about battery charge level and performance profile
- dim / undim display (*1)
- stop the machine from suspending when idle (*2)

So that's what I'm working on as part of my systray-like-functionality-crusade 
right now. I'd like to get feedback on the UI to make it meet our high 
standards. I've attached a first draft of a UI as a base for discussions. I'd 
like to implement this not as ui file, but using the Plasma widgets so it 
blends in nicely with the rest of the panel. The widget set available in 
plasma should be complete as far as I can see. (Meter is some sort of 
progressbar, so for battery charge it's ok, righto?)

(*1) Powerdevil can dim the display after a certain time of idleness, or on 
events such as "battery unplugged", "critical level reached". Often, you 
quickly want to crank it up again.

(*2) There's an 'inhibit suspend' action in the powermanagement FDO dbus spec 
which prevents the system from suspending after a certain idle time, that's 
useful when you're doing a presentation or watching a movie and you don't want 
to have your system switching off. Some apps will implement this themselves 
(imagine dragonplayer or kpresenter calling inhibit suspend through dbus when 
in fullscreen mode). That's not reliable however, as really all apps need to 
implement that, and most don't yet.


You've made it until here, you've earned a screenshot :-) I've also attached 
the ui file I used for your futzing.
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 

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