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

[From: Frantisek Dufka]

Weinehall David (Nokia-M/Tampere) wrote:
> 
> 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...

No problem. My point was about not letting user shutdown _easily_. By 
this I meant that most people selecting 'Power off' really don't mean 
shutdown but something like suspend/standby i.e. pause everything. It is 
consumer device. When you pres red button on TV or hi-fi remote you 
really don't expect it to poweroff completely and later wait 1 minute 
until it powers on again.  There should still be shutdown in case you 
want to replace battery safely but this will be used rarely (and can be 
deliberately a bit more complex like that button combo on ipaq). And my 
second point was that in such rare ocassion users might accept that 
alarms do not work. But if you implement it, it is better of course :) I 
just thought it is hard to do properly (i.e booting up, showing alarm 
and then shutting it down) and has little value. If someone has reason 
to poweroff it is likely he will not hear the alarm anyway. But it 
doesn't hurt of course.

>>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.

By signal I mean message about device mode change. It is already there, 
isn't it? It just need more fine-grained control or more modes. And you 
need it anyway for implementing that special feature for me below :)

> 
> 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.

Yes the cover is good way to go to this mode but it needs more options. 
What if you stream your music from home network and want still listen 
with cover on? Or what if you want it to 'soft poweroff' including the 
sound because you throw in in the bag then and go somewhere?

> 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.

Excellent. Thank you.

Frantisek