Main index > About new desklets > Battery status via apm

By exilejedi (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Thu Mar 24 07:04:37 2005: Battery status via apm.

I'm mobile a lot this week, so last night I wrote a little desklet to display my battery status (via apm, since my laptop doesn't support acpi). I don't ever plan on it being too amazing, but I will be glad to share the code once I get it cleaned up a bit, and it might be a useful thing to convert into a module for modubar....

By exilejedi (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Thu Mar 24 13:16:58 2005.

Okay, I have something that works well enough for my purposes. I will of course welcome anyone who wants to make it pretty and/or incorporate the logic into a nicer display--modubar seems like the ideal vehicle for reusing the basic logic. (HINT HINT)

I will package up 0.0.1 later today or tonight and submit it to the world...

By jeepston (Desklet Author), on Thu Mar 24 13:19:47 2005.

Do you have a screenshot?

By exilejedi (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Thu Mar 24 17:53:39 2005.

I will by the time I submit it, yes. :-)

I actually have a full-size screenshot taken with scrot shortly before I had to jet off to a presentation, and I was solidly busy since then.

Hopefully tonight I will be able to package it all up and submit it to Sylvain... And, yes, I will try to remember to post a screen shot or two here.

It's just a pretty basic desklet -- text only -- but it does change color, font, message, and size based on what it needs to display. It does not currently support any transparency or nicely shaded background for people who like those sorts of things.... I needed something that would sit at the bottom of my desktop next to my Flux toolbar and simply tell me how much of my battery I had burned through. :-)

By jeepston (Desklet Author), on Thu Mar 24 19:17:53 2005.

May be it would be useful to include possibility of notifying user that her laptop is running out of enrgy. Say one can set up a lower limit (for e.g. 3 %) and by reaching this limit, the desklet plays a sound or starts to flash or whatever is needed to attract attention :lol:

By exilejedi (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Thu Mar 24 23:01:04 2005.

By default, it does change color and font (to red and bold) when it gets below a certain threshold. Of course, my laptop apparently freaks out at about the same point as well (10%), and it starts beeping and flashing its little battery LED and generally causing a commotion.

If desklets were able to draw over things instead of staying hidden on the desktop, it could be fun to blast it to a gigantic size in the middle of the screen, ala the nice transparent status boxes that Mac OS X has available to it (such as when adjusting the volume or brightness, etc.)

By all means, if there is something you want to see it do, feel free to patch/extend/borrow/incorporate into modubar/etc. I have a series of work disasters to resolve once I get back (which I WOULD solve now, but the various hookups I have available to me all seem to hate our VPN client), so I doubt I will be spending much time hacking on desklets in the near future. :-/

By exilejedi (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Sun Mar 27 10:26:28 2005.

Okay, it's been submitted... Hopefully it will show up on the main download page shortly.

In the mean time, you can download it from my website at:

http://www.pirnat.com/geek/adesklets.shtml

Cheers!

By exilejedi (Core Developer & Desklet Author), on Mon Mar 28 22:09:07 2005.

Discussion (if any) can now move to the abatstat thread over in the "Existing Desklets" area.


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