ANNOUNCE: xfce4-power-manager 1.3.0 released

[Simon Steinbeiß]

On Thu, 5 Jun 2014 11:42:52 +0200
Guido Berhoerster <gber at opensuse.org> wrote:

> Yeah, I'm aware that it is not viable to hide a plugin, so showing
> a less "alarming" icon such as the plugged-in icon with a tooltip
> "No battery detected" or similar would be good.

Yup, I think that should be doable.

> This seems to happen when the width of the value exceeds the width
> of the scale. E.g. the value label "One Hour 28 minutes" is about
> twice as wide as the scale itself, how is that displayed with your
> theme?

Looks fine, as I said:
http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-2014-06-06-001150.php
We can cut down those strings a bit though to "hr" and "min".

> > > - why does the label on the "Display" tab say "Disable power saving"?
> > >   if it is supposed to mean "Display Power Saving" it can probably
> > >   be removed altogether
> > 
> > Good catch, that must be a left-over of the restructuring that settings dialog a few times. :)

You might've noticed I renamed it for now to be more in line with the system tab, which has an analogous label.

> Equal alignments and as few alignment lines as possible make it
> much easier to scan through a table, see
> https://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/2.32/hig-book.html#window-layout-spacing
> and
> https://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/2.32/hig-book.html#layout-callouts-figure,
> https://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/2.32/hig-book.html#preference-windows

Generally we do use equal alignments and I tried to follow that HIG. The labels in the tables won't expand, only the ones with the scales. The padding in between is 6px and around everything 12px, as mentioned in the HIG.
Anything in particular you'd wanna see changed here?
Maybe attach a mockup or simply edit the glade file so that it's clear.

> Hmm, at least with the Adwaita theme it is hard to read and implies
> something is deactivated when it is not. Though I'm not sure how
> such a table should look like and I'm not aware of any precedent...

We could also show icons instead, but that'd also look fairly non-standard. If people feel it's misleading, we can change it I guess (as soon as we know what to).

> I'm just wondering why you wouldn't want this to always be enabled
> (when NM is available).

Talk to the person who submitted this bugreport: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10702

> Well in this case upower cannot tell whether it is on battery or AC
> and there are no brightness controlling devices, yet I can set the
> inactivity time and brightness level for battery but not AC which
> seems weird.

Yeah, the settings dialog has to become more dynamic and responsive in that respect (and others). I'm mostly happy if people are ok with the way I re-organized things (which was quite time-consuming), I hope it's more accessible this way. Next step will be exactly what you're asking for.

> It's not so much about laptop vs desktop but the presence of
> devices which are exposed by upower, i.e. you might want to
> couple the visibility/sensitivity of widgets based on upower
> properties, mostly the presence of a bightness controlling device
> and one or more batteries (of course with the new design this is
> a bit more complicated than before where you could hide the
> tabs).

Yeah, it's still not that complicated though, just a few lines more. Given with how many lines we could theoretically save with cleaning up that file a bit, I guess it'll be ok.

> xfpm maintenance is sorely needed, so thanks taking care of it.

Trying our best :)

Cheers
Simon