Battery icon defaults

[Andrew Conkling]

On 4/19/06, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Another (minor) problem is that the battery icon appears in the
> notification area, and I think that this doesn't really fit the
> description of being a "notification".

Well, it does (at least to me) when it's set only to show while on
battery power or charging.  At the end of the day, I'll agree with
you, but I think this is a small point.

> The gnome applet (last time I looked, both appear by default) is a lot
> better, it gives an accurate representation of how much battery is left,
> and the colours are more reasonable. It also has the (splendid) option
> of displaying the percentage alongside the icon. To cap it all off, it's
> not in the notification area. So, all in all, lots better.

I tend to agree here, though the applet (with the battery display, at
least) takes up a lot more room on the panel.

Also, I think I heard it mentioned that it would be a problem on
desktops, since the notification would be off, whereas the applet is
always on.  I can't confirm this, since I have a laptop to test this
on, but perhaps we could work around it?

> There would also be a disadvantage of this: we'd lose the ability to
> right click and sleep/hibernate. But then again, in my opinion no one
> will use this, because (a) it's such a strange place to put such an
> ability, that very few people will find it, (b) we have the logout
> applet on panels by default, which people can use for fast logout
> dialogue access, and (c) most people use their function keys anyway, to
> sleep/hibernate, unless they don't have these.

a) Agreed
b) True, and even if the user turns these off, there's always System |
Logout or the power button for this.

Plus, even if it doesn't happen in this release cycle, we could
probably patch the battery applet to add the functionality, if it's
that big a deal to people.