[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Maemo Alarm/Notifier Interface

[From: Weinehall David (Nokia-M/Tampere)]

On mån, 2006-01-16 at 20:46 +0100, ext Frantisek Dufka wrote:
snip]
> Why not let users shutdown easily? Because you keep the state and don't
> need to boot the device through tons of /etc/rcx.D/* (and do it in 
> advance without user noticing anything) to handle single alarm and then 
> shutdown it again. Because with proper suspend (or should it be called 
> standby?) instead of poweroff you may save enough battery to have it 
> look like real poweroff without any ill effects. Because this is a PDA 
> or 'Internet Tablet' not unix server that can take minutes to boot or 
> shutdown and noone cares because you do it once per several years.

We already do the power saving part, we already have all the positive
side effects of keeping alive -- but *if* the user wants to do a proper
shutdown, which will allow him to keep the device alive even longer than
usual -- let them.  It's not going to hurt you one single bit -- you're
not forced to use the functionality just because it's there...

> Current 'Switch off!' mode should be something people should do only 
> when the want to put the device to drawer for months and want the 
> battery charged (which you could do by removing battery anyway). On ipaq 
> you have very awkward key combo for this mode buried deep in manual on 
> page noone reads. Not directly in menu on device. And yes in this mode 
> alarms are not supposed to wake up the device :-)

I don't really think we should consider iPaq as a reference point
of brilliant design...

I definitely expect my devices to wake up from sleep even when they're
off.  Hell, my phone(s) wakes up from sleep even when it's off.
Yours probably does too.

> > Power management efficient enough to make suspend meaningless 
> 
> If the suspend is taken as replacement of poweroff the reason is here 
> because it should pause the device in the midle of playing video or 
> sound. Take it as the current 'Lock touchscreen and keys' plus pausing 
> sound and network plus anything that takes power or keeps state that is 
> useless after couple of minutes.
> 
> Maybe suspending tasks is not needed after all just send them different 
> signal so they know device will be paused for many minutes and may wake 
> up in different environment so they should really finish/stop what they 
> do. So it is probably about more device modes than current offline or 
> flight mode (are they same?) and normal.

Introducing something like that would mean that we'd need to modify all
programs to handle custom signals.

As a side note: yes, at the moment, offline mode and flight mode are the
same, that may not remain so.

> > I cannot really understand why a lot of people here seem to want
> > crippled functionality just because other platforms have limitations.
> 
> Instant poweron and proper pausing of everything when you press one 
> button is not crippled functionality but very simple and neat thing Palm 
> devices do and people expect.

If you want the kind of soft "poweroff" you talk about,
try putting the cover on your device some time...

"Whoops!  It pauses video playback!  It disconnects network
connections!".

And if you really want the audio playback to be disabled too when
the cover is closed (personally I find it a quite nice that it keeps
playing), we can hack that up just for you, no problem.

All this said, the powerkeymenu is going to be redesigned to allow for
custom actions, and an action that emulates soft powerup by doing 
"enable keypadlock + offline mode + pause sound playback" should be
trivial enough to implement.


Regards: David Weinehall