battery plasmoid and remaining time..

[David Nolden]

Am Donnerstag 14 Mai 2009 12:40:35 schrieb Nuno Pinheiro:
> A Thursday 14 May 2009 11:10:29, Casper Clemence escreveu:
> > There are two questions
> >
> > 1) what is the most useful (or conversely, misleading) information for
> > the user 2) what is pleasant/pretty for the user
> >
> > My experience is that non-tech-savvy users tend to consider inaccurate
> > predictions to be simply "wrong". This means that they are (1) not
> > useful and (2) ugly because they make the desktop look broken.
> >
> > Given a percentage charge left it is quite natural to realise that
> > that charge may be used up at a different speed depending on what the
> > computer is used for. Giving a predicted time only serves to add
> > another layer: (a) understand why then computer "thinks" I have 20m of
> > battery left (b) work out whether that should be adjusted based on
> > what I'm actually doing. For this reason "intelligent" measures of
> > time left are probably more annoying than dumb ones (at least dumb
> > ones are consistent).
>
> exactly, people tend to extrapolate the time left by loking at the batery
> if they get the time wrong by 30 minutes its theyir bad mental calculation.
> if we say you have 1:00 and in reality it turns out it was only 30 minutes
> ist our bad couse we provided that wrong informaion.
We can do a better calculation than the users bad one, and that's why we 
should do it.

In the end, the user will calculate the remaining time anyway, but at least 
with working drivers, our calculation will be a lot better.

We shouldn't give disadvantage to the user just to make ourselves look better.

And about the "geeky" thing: "10% battery remaining" definitely looks more 
geeky than "Approx. 10 minutes remaining". So if anything, the percentage 
should be the hover information and the time the default.

Greetings, David