Public bug reported:
I have an IBM X40 with an extended 8-cell battery. The total battery
life is between 5 and 6 hours. I run Edgy.
GPM changes the colour of the systray icon from green to yellow when I
hit 49% remaining - i.e., using today as an example, when I have 2 hours
and 31 minutes of battery life left. This is more than most laptops have
at 100% charge. It changes the icon from yellow to red when I have about
an hour of battery life remaining. This is also unnecessarily scare-
inducing.
This is clearly ridiculous. The colour should be based on the time
remaining, not on the percentage remaining. I suggest:
> 45 minutes: green
45 - 15 minutes: yellow
< 15 minutes: red
This may, of course, require the icons to be dynamically generated or
coloured, rather than using a fixed icon set where colour is
inextricably linked to the "fullness" of the battery. But it would make
the indicator a heck of a lot more useful.
Another alternative would be to have an icon mode (either the default,
or an option) where the percentage left was overlaid on the icon itself.
Then I could ignore the colours and read the real situation.
Additionally, if you imagine the "fullness" of the icon as a series of
rows of pixels, then a particular row of pixels gets "un-coloured" as
soon as that row is reached, rather than half way through the range of
percentages it represents. In other words, when I go to 49.99%, the
indicator shows one row of pixels less than half full. This is a more
minor point, but still irritating.
These two factors together lead the icon to imply that I have less
percentage battery, and less actual battery time remaining than I have.
The result is that every time I want a sensible estimate, I have to
mouse over the icon and read the tooltip - defeating the point of having
an icon.
One last thing while I'm here: it took me weeks to work out that the "AC
charging" version of the icon had an overlaid electrical plug. I really
couldn't work out what it was. Take a tip from the mobile phone industry
and overlay a lightning bolt in the centre of the battery. That's a
fairly standard convention now.
Gerv
** Affects: gnome-power-manager (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: Unconfirmed
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Icon colour changes at inappropriate times (too early; red, yellow, green)
https://launchpad.net/bugs/74231
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