[Sugar-devel] automatic backlight control

[Paul Fox]

bert wrote:
 > On 21.11.2011, at 15:22, Paul Fox wrote:
 > 
 > > it quickly became clear (to me, at least) that it would be confusing
 > > if user-dimming behaved differently than auto-backlight-control, with
 > > respect to monochrome mode.  whether or not it's confusing to the
 > > user, it's definitely confusing to the code, since it's difficult to
 > > always do the right thing if the user and the sensor are both changing
 > > the brightness at the same time.  so i disabled the switch to
 > > monochrome entirely -- using the brightness keys doesn't change the
 > > color/mono setting.
 > 
 > IMHO (and not having tried it yet) the current behavior (switching
 > to mono when manually reducing brightness) is fine, and the best
 > compromise we found so far.

have we actually tried anything else?  the coupling of monochrome to
brightness has been this way forever, as far as i know.

honestly, i'm surprised people consider this coupling to be so
important.  given how subtle the difference between color and mono
modes with the backlight off, i really doubt most users would even
notice the change.


 > When you add the auto-turnoff, it should only toggle the backlight,
 > not the mono-color setting.  I don't think that would be too
 > confusing, from a user's POV it just means when it's bright
 > outside, the backlight's power gets cut.
 > 
 > I can see how it would lead to confusion if you map this desired
 > behavior onto the existing olpc-brightness command.  What's needed
 > I think is an additional "override" independent of the brightness
 > setting that just turns the backlight off.  Everything else would
 > stay the same.

it's not that easy.  unless neither brightness mechanism messes with
the mono setting, then they need to be coupled somehow.  otherwise
if the backlight is auto-offed (still color), then the user uses the
"dim" key (no brightness change, but now mono), and then the backlight
auto-ons, it will now be in mono.  there's perhaps a way around that,
but you can see that it gets tricky to cover all cases.

do you also object to the new color/mono toggle, via the control
key (or via the UI)?

please try os12, when available, and see how it feels.

paul

 > 
 > - Bert -
 > 

=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org