Daniel Carosone wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 01:57:12PM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>>	gives battery percentage relative to the design capacity.
>>	apm (and Windows) seem to give it relative to the last full
>>	charge.  It isn't clear to me which is correct.  
> 
> (This is very much a UI design issue, of course). 

IIRC, 'relative to the last full charge' is mandated in the ACPI spec.
I do like the idea of showing all the information, though. :)

> What might be best is a battery bar display that shows the design
> capacity on the full scale, and marks the difference between that and
> the last full as "inaccessible" (eg, in some other colour), and then

How to show and label this to be conformant with the spec and not
mystify the user could actually be tricky.  Maybe the best word for
the shaded portion is "lost" (which is both simple, and doesn't have
the hint of "inaccessible" that someone is trying to keep it from you :).
A numeric % value could be superimposed on the bar, /centered in the
last-full-capacity space/ and calculated relative to it.

-Chap