GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 160467
Rephrase low-battery warning and make selectable
Last modified: 2005-05-24 13:43:27 UTC
Currently, the low-battery warning is phrased like this: "16 minutes (15%) remaining. To avoid losing work please power off, suspend or plug your laptop in." It ends with a preposition and the one comma disrupts the flow of the sentence. Pedantic, I know, but I think the following would be better: "16 minutes (15%) battery power remaining. Power off, suspend, or plug in your laptop to avoid losing work." The text in the warning isn't selectable, either. Oh, and one last thing: wouldn't it be cool if there were "Suspend" and "Power off" buttons on that alert?
CCing Usability for both points. From a technical aspect with the second one. Powering off/suspending the system is difficult as an ordinary user. I'll have to check how this is achieved in gdm... but I suspect that I will not like the answer. Realistically this is a job for the hypothetical PowerManager (http://live.gnome.org/PowerManager) (gdm should also use the same solution).
I agree Adam's proposed wording is better (although I prefer the less geeky "switch off" to "power off"). You could argue that powering off your laptop isn't necessarily going to save any more of your work than your battery suddenly dying, though-- when I press the power button on my laptop, it shuts down cleanly, but it still doesn't save any documents I had open at the time. So perhaps "plug in or suspend" are the only two options we should really mention here?
Though we're waiting for a PowerManager, I guess this should be fixed in the meantime. Assigning bug, looking at it later.
Chris, three things to work on. - Reword the dialog, - Make the text selectable, and - Stop [OK] being the default button. At the moment, when you're typing you can space or enter through the dialog when it pops up. Ideally you should either have to click, or press Tab->Enter.
Created attachment 46472 [details] [review] proposed patch 1) "15 minutes (5%) battery power remaining. To avoid losing work, suspend, plug in or save open documents and switch off your laptop." 2) text is now selectable 3) the issue of accidentally hitting space or enter and clearing the dialog has been resolved by davyd's patches to cause the dialog to pop on top but not steal focus.
Commited patch with slight modification: "15 minutes (5%) battery power remaining" is now "15 minutes (5%) of battery power remaining".
Hmm, how do I suspend or plug in my open documents? :) Should really be something like "suspend or plug in your laptop, or save open documents and switch off your laptop".
Is there any possible way to avoid saying "your laptop" twice?
Why not just forget about mentioning open documents? Trying to switch off your laptop ought to pop up all sorts of "quit confirmation" dialogs on open documents. (I don't know if it *does* or not, but even if it doesn't, I think everybody saves documents before shutting down.)
> Is there any possible way to avoid saying "your laptop" twice? Hmm, well, I guess you could say something like "suspend or plug in your laptop, or save open documents before switching it off" instead. But my recollection is that the docs styleguide advises against using impersonal pronouns wherever possible, for ease of translation. Cc'ing Eugene for any better ideas, before he disappears :/ > Trying to switch off your laptop ought to pop up all sorts of "quit confirmation" dialogs on open documents. Indeed it should, but as yet it doesn't AFAIK. (I don't think Linux has the kernel support for that sort of thing ATM, but I could be wrong...)
>> Trying to switch off your laptop ought to pop up all sorts of "quit confirmation" dialogs on open documents. >Indeed it should, but as yet it doesn't AFAIK. (I don't think Linux has the kernel support for that sort of thing ATM, but I could be wrong...) It'd be the session manager's responsibility, not the kernel's.
Only if the session manager ever gets to know about it-- when I press the power switch on my Dell laptop, it just switches straight off when I'm running Linux. (Windows shuts down gracefully.)
I just want to tease out a little bit exactly what is going on before making a recommendation. What we are saying is that, to avoid losing data in unsaved documents, the user must do one of the following: - Suspend your laptop - Plug in your laptop - Save all open documents, then switch off your laptop A couple of questions: 1. What exactly does suspend do? Does the laptop enter a particular mode? Is data saved to the hard disk, and then the system switched off? 2. In the third option above, is the "then switch off your laptop" redundant? The user has already saved all open documents. What are we really asking the user to do? Save all open documents, or restore the laptop to a state where lack of power is not a threat to the functioning of the laptop.