On 4/9/06, Luis Villa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 4/9/06, Corey Burger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I completely disagree. There are a few good reasons why an icon should > > be displayed all the time > > > > 1. What state the battery is in is always relevant. Power is the > > single most important thing on a laptop. Without it, you are going > > nowhere. > > Wrong. It only matters when you're getting so low you are in danger of > losing work, or when the status changes, or in a couple other corner > cases which can be designed for. Wrong. ;-) It matters unless the battery is fully charged and the laptop is plugged in. IMNSHO anyway. > It is *not* the most important thing- the most important thing is whatever > work > I'm actually *doing*. Agreed. > I strongly recommend reading 'Designing From Both Sides of the > Screen', where one of the simple design heuristics is to make software > that acts like a butler (or in this case, a chauffeur.) As you drive > around town, does your chauffeur say 'by the way sir, the gas tank is > now 59% full.' (minutes pass) 'oh, now 58% full sir.' No. If your > chauffeur did that, you'd fire him for being an irritating idiot. A > good chauffeur tells you 'Sir, the tank is very nearly empty- shall I > find a station?', and a great chauffeur asks you once 'how early would > you like me to warn you about the gas, sir?' and then remembers that > in the future. When you pull the plug out of the wall, I mean, when > you come upon the sign that says 'huge desert- no gas for a long way', > a good chauffeur says 'Sir, we only have enough gas for 299 miles at > current consumption- would you like me to turn around?' The analogy is somewhat off -- having the icon showing is not the same as it constantly popping up dialog windows saying "Your battery is down to 58% full, sir". The applet showing is more like the gas gauge on your car that you can check whenever you want but doesn't interrupt your normal driving. > A good chauffeur, of course, does allow you to ask 'how much gas do we > have?' whenever you get nervous, and admittedly we don't have a great > way of doing that right now when the icon is purely in notification > mode. It would be better to figure that out, though, than to > needlessly put the information on the screen all the time. This part of the analogy seems more appropriate to me. I'd be fine with a compromise of some sort that didn't have it showing all the time but made it easily (and discoverably) queryable. Just my random $0.02, Elijah _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
