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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: powerdevil changing the brightness level - default behaviour
From:       Parker Coates <parker.coates () gmail ! com>
Date:       2009-01-11 1:56:57
Message-ID: 85d347350901101756l1edc93ack7712e8ad58be425b () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 14:57, Sven Burmeister wrote:
> Powerdevil has a certain brightness level set for each power profile. So if
> you plug-in your power, you can get 100% brightness, if your battery reaches
> 25% it will switch to another profile and apply the 80% brightness that are
> set for that profile, if the battery only has 12% left it would change to yet
> another profile which has 50% brightness. If you plug-in the power, it would
> change the profile and set the brightness to 100%.
>
> Now the question is, how powerdevil should handle the brightness, if the user
> has set it manually, e.g. via the slider of the battery applet.
>
> Can anyone help out with some expertise?

I'm certainly not claiming any expertise here, but I see two other
options that haven't really been mentioned. As a programmer, these
were the first implementations that jumped to mind.

1. Simply add a selector to switch between "Use manually set
brightness level" and "Use brightness level from current profile".

2. Get rid of the idea of a manually set brightness level. Instead
have "manual" changes just alter the brightness value stored for the
current profile.

These are both quite simple from an implementation point of view, but
they do have the advantage that they never have to guess the users
intention and therefore are not likely to ever surprise the user. They
give the user full control, but don't do anything automatically.

Of course, my natural instinct after seeing the above options is to
think that with the power of a CPU and the smarts of a good
programmer, we should be able to make the system intelligent enough to
anticipate the users needs. But as this threads shows, such an
algorithm might not exist as expectations vary from user to user.

I'm not sure if any of the above blabber is actually a useful
contribution to this conversation, but I thought I'd mention it
anyway, as this is an interesting situation where adding more
"intelligence" to the system makes its actions sometimes appear
"dumb".

Parker
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