I have an IBM X40 with an extended 8-cell battery. The total battery life is between 5 and 6 hours. I run Edgy.
GPM changes the colour of the systray icon from green to yellow when I hit 49% remaining - i.e., using today as an example, when I have 2 hours and 31 minutes of battery life left. This is more than most laptops have at 100% charge. It changes the icon from yellow to red when I have about an hour of battery life remaining. This is also unnecessarily scare-inducing.
This is clearly ridiculous. The colour should be based on the time remaining, not on the percentage remaining. I suggest:
> 45 minutes: green
45 - 15 minutes: yellow
< 15 minutes: red
This may, of course, require the icons to be dynamically generated or coloured, rather than using a fixed icon set where colour is inextricably linked to the "fullness" of the battery. But it would make the indicator a heck of a lot more useful.
Another alternative would be to have an icon mode (either the default, or an option) where the percentage left was overlaid on the icon itself. Then I could ignore the colours and read the real situation.
Additionally, if you imagine the "fullness" of the icon as a series of rows of pixels, then a particular row of pixels gets "un-coloured" as soon as that row is reached, rather than half way through the range of percentages it represents. In other words, when I go to 49.99%, the indicator shows one row of pixels less than half full. This is a more minor point, but still irritating.
These two factors together lead the icon to imply that I have less percentage battery, and less actual battery time remaining than I have. The result is that every time I want a sensible estimate, I have to mouse over the icon and read the tooltip - defeating the point of having an icon.
One last thing while I'm here: it took me weeks to work out that the "AC charging" version of the icon had an overlaid electrical plug. I really couldn't work out what it was. Take a tip from the mobile phone industry and overlay a lightning bolt in the centre of the battery. That's a fairly standard convention now.
Gerv
> It changes the icon from yellow to red when I have about an hour of
> battery life remaining.
Actually, that's wrong. It's about an hour and a half. 30%, perhaps?
Gerv