on the community, the batteries, and on some really old dinosaur
so, today’s blog entry is presented in fuzzy vision, for solidarity to drunk people.
Yesterday I was feeling pretty pissed off by how things were going. But fortunately, the KDE community demostrated once more how great and friendly it is. =) I received a lot of virtual hugs and good words on IRC, on private mail and in comments. And I’m really thankful to everyone of you for the kind words, they really helped me. =)
Sebastian turns out to be our most favourite teddy bear ever, and today, despite he woke up at 5 AM and was just back from a long journey, popped up on IRC and pinged me, we explained ourselves, and in a few minutes the atmosphere and everything was back to the usual KDE hugs and kisses. Misunderstandings are pretty bad, but fortunately now all seems good. Or, as sebas writes… I love teddy bears! =)
So, today I finished my mockup for the battery, and sent it to the Plasma devel mailing list. I’ll show it also here, so that I’ll gather some more feedback.
However, before I’ll show it, a couple of notes:
The icons (especially brightness icons) are temprorary, as you might guess. I’ll probably add a brightness label too, I was just feeling lazy :P.
Some icons will probably also need to be made ad-hoc, for now I just borrowed some from the icon theme. In place of the ‘java’ icons there will be icons specific to each profile.
Apart for that, this is the mockup for the popup that will appear clicking on the battery in the panel, while on planar (desktop/dashboard/media-center…) contianments there will be just the ‘status’ part (the part above the line) with a little togglable button (label for it? “options…”?) bottom-right which will slide out the configuration options and will make the plasmoid look like the following mockup, which is designed, as I said, for the panel.
Some other points that are worth noticing:
- I tried to pack up the space, and manipulating the background with inkscape is not the easiest thing ever. I’m sure that the end result (especially with better font rendering) will look less cluttered.
- a ‘brightness’ label on the slider might be good, I was just hoping for cleaerer icons. let’s see how this turns out.
- the checkbox “disable warnings” will become another thing, used to toggle “presentation mode” (no autosuspend, no warnings, no screensaver, …)
- yes, I will show the CPU frequency in the progressbar
- we need better wording =)
Ok, so, after the notes… here it is!
And, yes, this is meant to become the controller for powerdevil. =)
As a sidenote, and to unveil the last part of my title, lately I got pretty annoyed with the status of the development of raptor so far. Especially with the estimated developed times being 20.000 years (I’m saying the truth, check here if you don’t believe me! (towards the end)) :P . To put it bluntly, things were simply stagnating for way too long. So I sit down, met, talked to and recruited some devlopers (namely Dario ‘drf’ Freddi of PowerDevil’s fame, Davide Bettio and Lukas Appelhans), we created a git repo, and we started the fun.
We’re being hosted at github for now, like arora, and we plan to merge back to SVN right before moving to kdereview.
The repo URL is: http://github.com/ruphy/raptor.
The biggest work will likely be the view, so if you have some expertise in QPainter, layouts, or computer graphics, and feel like you want to give us a hand, don’t exitate to drop us (or me) a line or fork the repo on github. =)
So, now, our stated goal is to have raptor ready for 4.2, with *at least* basic functionalities and legacy category support.
Note that, once we’ll have some usable code, we’ll badly need some feedback from users so that we can see what we can optimize further and what are the concepts that work better, so that we can then optimize the menu the best way possible.
We’re all motivated and dedicated to do it, we’ve just completed the design phase, and me and drf will meet in RL weekly for some code sprints on it, too. And we’ll also be joining our forces with our good friend Ivan Cucik (please pardon me the accents, ivan =) ), author of Lancelot, to be able to faster kick, kickoff, off. ;-)
Wow, that was long! Later on!
Comment by Ramsees — September 13, 2008 @ 10:52 pm
Honestly I still can’t understand why the progress bar is necesary.
Comment by FVA — September 13, 2008 @ 11:22 pm
That plasmoid looks awesome, but I’d like to make two small suggestions:
– Why not try using dolphin’s disk usage progressbar for the CPU speed?
– Maybe make that divider line fade out at its edges?
I assume the other controls (slider and checkbox) will be rendered as oxygen variants in the real version?
Other than that, really nice work, and great to see you’ve worked out that misunderstanding :)
Comment by Rafa — September 13, 2008 @ 11:34 pm
Finally some progress news about raptor… Hope you can make it for 4.2. Right now, Lancelot has the lead in the menu wars… :P
Comment by Noname — September 13, 2008 @ 11:42 pm
@Ramsees:
Wouldn’t it be nice to know that your CPU is drinking your battery like water when you are dying for just a little more battery time?
Comment by Ian Monroe — September 14, 2008 @ 2:40 am
Ramsees: We already have a basic battery plasmoid if thats what your looking for.
Comment by Kyle Cunningham — September 14, 2008 @ 3:02 am
May I suggest that the icon for full brigthness be a lit lightbulb. It would help with visual continuity and it would be hot!
Comment by amir — September 14, 2008 @ 5:39 am
looks great, one suggestion i have is to “sense” for a laptop or a desktop and not show the battery and brightness control for a desktop. thank you, amir
Pingback by PowerDevil, gestione dell’alimentazione in KDE4 « pollycoke :) — September 14, 2008 @ 2:33 pm
[...] ciascuno dei profili a piacimento, e invece questo qui sotto è il controllo che il prontissimo Riccardo “ruphy” Iaconelli1 ha appena scritto per permettere la gestione dell’alimentazione tramite un altrettanto [...]
Comment by TheBlackCat — September 14, 2008 @ 5:04 pm
A couple of suggestions/questions:
Will there be two CPU bars for dual-core computers? I think that is important, especially if you turn off one of the CPUs (that bar can be grayed out)
Having the battery percent superimposed on the battery icon might save some space. This would be similar to the mouse-over on the current battery plasma applet. Also, I assume the batter icon will change depending on whether you are on batter or on AC? Also, having it change colors depending on the current level (green for good, yellow for low, orange for warning, red for critical, etc.) if you it doesn’t already. Having the notches on the batter icons correspond, in terms of percentage, to the cutoff-point for the 4 different levels (good, low, warning, critical) would also be cool (but not as important).
I think a numerical percentage is important for brightness slider, both for the plasma applet and for the power-devil systemsettings section. For the plasma applet having it fade in when you move the slider and then disappear when you are done with it might make things a bit cleaner. Also, having one icon that gets brighter or dimmer depending on the slider position might be a bit cleaner-looking as well.
Will there be a way to display your graphics card activity level in the same way as your CPU activity?
Comment by Dread Knight — September 14, 2008 @ 6:13 pm
This is very awesome, just got myself a tablet pc and install kubuntu/kde4 on it.
@Kyle: how about ecological lightbulbs? :P
Comment by teezee — September 14, 2008 @ 6:56 pm
I modified your mockup quick and dirty style: have a look.
http://img254.imageshack.us/my.php?image=batterylg0.jpg
Comment by H:Jack — September 15, 2008 @ 1:08 pm
“Kyle Cunningham — September 14, 2008 @ 3:02 am
May I suggest that the icon for full brigthness be a lit lightbulb. It would help with visual continuity and it would be hot!”
I would rather prefere the way it is. This black and yellow thingy is just stylish(TM).
Excellent work so far ruphy!
Comment by H:Jack — September 15, 2008 @ 1:12 pm
Sorry Kyle Cunningham,
just saw that there is a black lightblub. I didn’t see it because I have a TFT here … . Anyways, just a black and a yellow spot would be great too (imho).
Comment by Fri13 — September 15, 2008 @ 8:07 pm
Hmm… Why does that mockup have wrong “progressbar” showing the CPU frequency?
In earlier planetkde posts when someone was designing something, they used the “bars” kind a progress bar for 0-100% information. So the 0-100% scale was made from 20 blocks what makes it hard to read.
But now we have CPU frequency about, and you dont usually have many steps on it, and we have solid progress bar for it ;-)
What if you make the progress bar from blocks, one block represents the one step. If the plasmoid (or is this widget?) can read the ACPI information, it knows how many steps does CPU support. And then it could show the right steps. And then user could just easily understand it.
Or then I have misunderstand the bar, what should really show the CPU usage like on Feezee comment.
But if it idea is throttling
Comment by Fri13 — September 15, 2008 @ 9:05 pm
Hmm… Why does that mockup have wrong “progressbar” showing the CPU frequency?
In earlier planetkde posts when someone was designing something, they used the “bars” kind a progress bar for 0-100% information. So the 0-100% scale was made from 20 blocks what makes it hard to read.
But now we have CPU frequency about, and you dont usually have many steps on it, and we have solid progress bar for it ;-)
What if you make the progress bar from blocks, one block represents the one step. If the plasmoid (or is this widget?) can read the ACPI information, it knows how many steps does CPU support. And then it could show the right steps. And then user could just easily understand it.
Or then I have misunderstand the bar, what should really show the CPU usage like on Feezee comment.
But if it idea is to show throttling state, then it should be bars.
Mayby a leds or blocks what are from green to red. ;-)
Then user would know that what is the processed HEAT of the CPU and how egological it is for environment (green meter ;-))
http://img359.imageshack.us/my.php?image=rect655932bh6.jpg
Something like that… The both cores are shown (or multiple CPU’s) and upper one is just showing the middle state so the saturation is lowered from levels what is not used.