Okay, it appears my last blog post provoked a large reaction. I think the conclusion was that the libnotify notification was indeed crack-tastic, and that we should probably add this information to the tooltip, or just try and 'Do The Right Thing'.
For the moment, I've added a small “Battery charge profile is estimated” to the tooltip, but I'll try to fallback to the rate calculation time remaining, although that might mean dealing with all the duff data that comes with that. Cheer for all the feedback.
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hughsie
Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management.
Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.
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In shipping versions, the applet will confidently claim that there are, say, one hour and 47 minutes remaining, giving three digits of precision when we know that the estimate is nowhere near that accurate. What if you communicated with digits of precision? You might report 1:47 for a battery that you have a good history for, and just say “about 2 hours” when someone plugs in a new battery that claims to be fully charged, but that you have no profile for. The underlying model would be that you have an estimate and error bars, and you find a way in the display to communicate about the error bars: report a round number that's in the interior of the region, don't report more significant figures than you have, and add the modifier “about” if there isn't even one digit of precision.