power management settings mockup

[Celeste Lyn Paul]

Hi Sebas, here are some quick thoughts:

Battery charge level: needs a colon at the end 

Battery charge level label should be sentence case

System performance profile label should be sentence case.

Do we need "System" as a modifier?  Does "Performance profile:" make sense?

What is the second % bar trying to tell me? Should it have a label or does it 
belong to some other option?

Does Inhibit Suspend after Idle Time mean it doesnt suspend after idle time is 
up?  Is there a better way of saying this?  Does "Do not suspend [on,after] 
idle" convey the same message? (or does the inverse Suspend on idle make 
sense since a "do not" unchecked check box is sortof a double negative)

Inhibit suspend after idletime label should be in sentence case

Current Brightness could be just Brightness. I'm assuming since there are no 
commit buttons and that this is instant apply.  At the same time, if this is 
instant apply, there needs to be an Undo or Revert.  If this isn't instant 
apply, I'm still not sure if we need the "Current" modifier.  You're setting 
this up as a "now" configuration dialog and not configuration for the future, 
correct?  This isn't profile management.

Current brightness should be in sentence case

Current brightness: should have a colon

Need more space between the slider and the Configure Power Management button 
to disassociate it from the slider widget. (The close position makes it feel 
like it belongs to the option instead of on its own)

Configure Power Management button, to ellipsis or not to ellipsis? We use an 
ellipsis in the label for menubar items (Configure Something...)

On Friday 12 September 2008 06:03:47 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> 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.



-- 
Celeste Lyn Paul
KDE Usability Project
usability.kde.org