GNOME Battery Status
	Battery Applet/Indicator for GNOME Power Management


GNOME Battery Status is a project for GNOME, that shows information about
laptop battery state. It has some additional features, so usual icon of
gnome-power-manager can be removed from notification/indicator area.
Battery Status doesn't rely on gnome-power-manager directly, but counting
on presence in system for some useful integration with it.

Table of Content
	0. Rationale
	1. Installation
	2. Basic Usage
	3. Additional Settings
	4. Technical Details
	5. Links

====

0. Rationale

gnome-power-manager's icon has got main user interface shortcoming (if its
purpose - to show battery information) - for see exactly battery percentage or
battery lifetime, user should hover mouse to icon, wait couple seconds, and
only then user could see required information (tooltip - the bad way for
getting information in such cases). Such behavior pretty annoying, so
Battery Status' applet hasn't got such behavior and allow to user see
percentage/lifetime/charge time of battery right in panel next to icon.
Also, using gnome-power-manager's icon, user can't direct place, where exactly
battery information should be showing.

/!\ Problems, which has been described above, can be solved
by using battstat-applet (Battery Charge Monitor applet), but it has some
historical architectural disadventages (such as relies on ACPI and HAL) and
user interface problems (such as using non-consistent icons) itself, and by
these reasons this applet has been declared as obsolete, has been deprecated
and removed from set of standart gnome-applets package in such key GNOME Desktop
GNU/Linux distributions as Fedora and Ubuntu (see also this [1] discussion for
more information)

Another impovement - warning message about critical battery charge.
gnome-power-manager supports notifications (via notification-daemon/notify-osd),
and this is very useful. But when user is deep in thoughts about his current
work/task/action/etc, his locus of attention (see [2] for more details)
may just couldn't see notification-like warning about critical low (which very
important if user hasn't get access for power) - it should be message on top of
all windows.

Device information dialog (which has been totaly deprecated in last versions)
from gnome-power-manager's icon has been replaced by battery
status dialog in Battery Status. In "Device Information" dialog all battery
information puts in one non-human-readable heap and this dialog doesn't meet
GNOME HIG requirements partially, but in "Battery Status" dialog battery
information divided by two easy-readable areas - one for battery capacity,
and another for battery charge.

====

1. Installation

Battery Status can be installed from package, or from sources.
For better experience you should re-login after installation.
Packages for Ubuntu can be found in this launchpad repository:
http://launchpad.net/~iaz/+archive/battery-status
Debian/Ubuntu-related source code tree (with debian/ directory for packaging):
bzr co lp:battery-status
non-Debian/Ubuntu source code tree (without debian/ directory):
git clone git://github.com/ia/battery-status.git
Command for installation from sources:
python setup.py install

====

2. Basic Usage

After adding applet at panel, by default it shows icon only.
From main menu user (by default) can get access to:
 - Battery Status dialog
 - Power Statistics (provided by gnome-power-manager)
 - Show setting
 - Text Size setting
 - CPU frequency scaling (provided by cpufreq-applet)
 - Power Management preferences (provided by gnome-power-manager)
From context menu (by clicking right mouse button at applet) user can get
acces to:
 - Bug Reporting (apport/launchpad integration)
 - GNOME Power Management help
 - About information dialog
 - generic applet-related options (such as Remove, Move, Lock To Panel)

====

3. Additional settings

Battery Applet uses GConf for settings. All keys can be found in
/apps/battery_status. Description for each key you
can find using gconf-editor.

====

4. Technical Details

Battery Status written in Python with using:
 - PyGTK - python bindings to GTK library
 - python-appindicator - python bindings to AppIndicator library
 - Bonobo - for integration application in GNOME panel as applet
 - GConf - for keep and manage applet settings
 - UPower/DeviceKit-power - for getting power information
 - D-Bus - for getting power information from DeviceKit-power and update it on changes

====

5. Links

homepage - http://live.gnome.org/BatteryStatus
github page - http://github.com/ia/battery-status
launchpad page - http://launchpad.net/battery-status

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2009-August/002183.html
[2] "The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems",
	Jeff Raskin

Related links to other discussions and bugs:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/03/16-things-that-could-be-improved-in.html
(the same post - http://humphreybc.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/its-the-little-things-that-count
 see "What happened to the nice battery stats window?" section)
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-applets/+bug/462267
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-application/+bug/541609
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1263401
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1460826
http://chrisjohnston.org/2010/no-more-battery-status-tooltip-in-lucid
http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/battery
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BatteryStatusMenu

Feel free for sending any questions/advices/UX improvements/bug reports/feature requests/patches/etc.