Battery improvements in kde plasma 4.4
Submitted by srlinuxx on Fri, 11/27/2009 - 11:39
The battery applet in KDE Plasma 4.4 has gotten some nice improvements. First of all, I wasn’t really happy with the layout of its popup dialog. It looked messy and didn’t scale well with bigger fonts. During Tokamak3 in September, I started improving this. To make it look calmer, I reduced the amount of edges widgets are aligned to. The previous version used nested layouts, which lead to widgets not properly aligned with each other. This creates a rather messy look. For 4.4, I’ve reworked the layout and reduced everything to only one layout and attached the battery in the popup off-layout in the top-right corner. I thought about using an AnchorLayout for this, but a simple setGeometry() to position the battery top-right would work as well, so I went for KISS. I also replaced the text on the "Configure Power Management" button with a tooltip, reducing visual clutter but keeping this handy in-context shortcut to easily get at the more advanced power managment settings.
The battery popup now resembles a FormLayout more closely, which should make it more consistent with how other dialogs in KDE are designed, so that’s a bonus in consistency. The two screenshots show the old and the new version of the applet side-by-side.
kde battery applet – the sequel
vizzzion.org/blog: There have been quite some comments to my previous blog, among them some good points how to further improve the clarity of the battery applet’s info and control panel. I thought the best way to address this is with a patch, and a bit of explanation of those changes. So here’s the dialogue after a bit of further hacking on it:
Rest Here
We are but slaves to batteries ? Charged batteries use daily ?
All batteries died when it is charged and neglected. You have to be a slave to use the battery everyday to keep it fresh. Charged battery not used will oxidize or crystallize and discharge cycles may come too late. Periodic usage makes a good battery service longer.
Humidity control make a battery last longer, which means helping the seals to prevent drying up by taping seals with scotch tape, captured humidity in the rubber cement may breathe back into the battery; may help lengthen life of any battery. Lithium batteries has a life of ten years if left uncharged. Once charged the thermal changes will let the battery breathe, and moisture in the battery depends on the room humidity. Air conditioner without humidifier is bad for batteries.
Hope your batteries last forever!