As much as I am naturally sceptical about the amount of trust developers put in these studies which basically boil down to observing a handful of people for a few hours, I have to admit they do seem actually pretty effective, particularly for cases like this.

As much as I am naturally sceptical about the amount of trust developers put in these studies which basically boil down to observing a handful of people for a few hours, I have to admit they do seem actually pretty effective, particularly for cases like this.

* General settings, stab 1:
If you look at it, “Profiles Assignment” and “Advanced Battery Settings” are really the same thing. Imagine a layout like this:
- On AC power | (spacer) | (profile combobox)
- On battery | (spacer) | (profile combobox)
- On low battery | (percentage spinbox) | (profile combobox)
- Critical battery level | (percentage spinbox) | (actions combobox)

That would, for instance, get rid of the split between “Settings and profiles” and “Advanced Battery Settings”, and I claim it’s more usable still. Also note that I dropped the “warning” battery level… really, no one actually needs 3 different on-battery states, “normal” battery and “low” battery should really be enough. Which also has the advantage that you can drop one profile, so one set of configuration values doesn’t have to be configured at all. Cool.

* General settings, stab 2:
The user can already enable notifications in the “Configure Notifications” dialog that is accessible through the button. So again, without any loss in functionality, you could just drop both the “Enable notifications” and “Enable warning notifications” checkboxes, and let the user configure it by opening the dialog and selecting the configurations on a case-by-case basis. The list of events is reasonably small, and most users won’t feel the need to change the default notifications anyways, so why clutter the interface with redundant options.

Personally, I’d also drop the “Before doing a suspend action, wait N seconds” dude – seriously, who is going to change that? (and why would they want to do it? i can see no use case for this option being disabled or changed.)

* Profiles, introduction and short rant (sorry, I have to):
When Sebas countered Matthew Garrett’s accusations, he dismissed practically all of the suggestions saying they’re getting implemented anyways (or similar). I must say when I saw the final 4.2 version I was really disappointed to see all of Garrett’s points being totally valid and unaddressed. So if you want to improve user experience, maybe you should focus on those points first.

* Profiles, stab 1:
The “When Laptop Lid Closed”, “When Power Button Pressed” and “When Sleep Button Pressed” options should be global. It’s not only tiring that I have to set these five times if I want to change them, but if different settings are actually used then that’s also confusing to the user: At which of four battery levels does it invoke which action? Try to remember all possible combinations, and I’ll tell you it’s not a good idea to let your users do that. Less complexity here actually equals more usage of the lid and buttons, because people can rely on a single action being executed (and thus, they feel confident enough to invoke the action).

* Profiles, stab 2:
I know that it might take a tiny amount of flexibility away, but if you hardcode the set of available profiles then you can put them in the iconview on the left, replacing the “Edit profiles” tab with the direct four profiles (AC Power, Battery, Low Battery, Presentation). That way, stuff like the energy star logo or some description/combobox combinations might actually fit into the dialog at standard sizes.

I didn’t consider this in my “General settings, stab 1″ suggestions, so let’s rework the layout there once more:

- Low battery level: (percentage spinbox)
- Critical battery level: (percentage spinbox)
- On critical battery level: (actions combobox)

Even simpler, still with no loss in functionality (apart from the hardcoded set of profiles, of course).

* Profiles, stab 3:
As Matthew Garrett stated, certain settings don’t belong in there as they’re not really related to power management and battery runtime. “Turn off the following CPUs” and the cpufreq governor are unnecessary if not misleading, I don’t quite get why these really need to be exposed this prominently. Power users who actually know the real implications could easily set this by means of the run-script-on-loading-profile option. Likewise, (also as per Garrett’s remark,) KWin compositing doesn’t really belong in power management settings either.

All in all, you should now be able to fold the “CPU and System” tab into “Actions”, and if you made the profiles into iconview KCMs then the layout allows for real tabs instead of the ToolWidget pseudo-tabs. usability++ :-]

* Profiles, stab 4:
The Presentation profile needs to vanish, too. It shouldn’t be a separate profile but a set of overrides that modify the current profile. Essentially, all it needs to do is a) disable the laptop lid and system-idle-for-N-minutes actions, b) disable display power management, and c) disable the lock-screen functionality.

Also, last time I checked, Dragon Player did not cause a switch to the Presentation profile, and brings up those obnoxious screen locks in the middle of watching movies. I wonder if there is a possibility to make it work automatically with cross-platform players like VLC too.

If you can’t rely on the Presentation mode being enabled reliably, I suggest making “Presentation” into a toggle pushbutton for the plasmoid popup, right next to the profile selection combobox (without text, only showing the “presentation” icon that’s also used in Okular or Digikam). Or, if you decide to implement my suggestion of hardcoding the set of profiles, that toggle button might just replace the Profile selection altogether (as the profile is anyways selected by the battery state).

* One more point:
The What’s This help text screams “PowerDevil” in big letters, and “Let PowerDevil manage screen powersaving” also contains the name. You already made some adaptations to not show the daemon name in all places, but it’s still left in some prominent ones. That’s not only offending to the one guy from the Dot who fears the devil, but also requires the common user to learn about implementation issues that shouldn’t be necessary to know. I jus wanted to suggest replacing the display power management option with “KDE power management” instead of “PowerDevil”, but now that I think of it, that option is already present in the profile settings. So why don’t just get rid of it and configure it there.

– end of suggestions

I hope you can make something out of these points. Please note that I’m not at all pursuing the GNOME approach of removing useful settings. But in its current state, PowerDevil requires a significant effort for the common user to get simple settings set up properly, only to make a few features possible that won’t be used by virtually anybody. Please try to get the interface up to speed, I’ll promise you it’ll be easier to add other useful options afterwards… and really, making the current UI usable is more important right now than adding new stuff to it. Hopefully you’ll agree with that :]

For example, say that you start a slideshow in Gwenview. Gwenview emits “slideshow” and PowerDevil reacts by setting the screen brightness to 100% and disabling the screensaver and monitor sleep mode.

I think it is an absolutely brilliant idea.