3g/dialup usability

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2009-02-17 at 17:51 -0500, Carlos Romero wrote:
> I might be interested.
> Thinking of a billing period reset and overage warnings too.
> NMize modemlights by removing the connect button or connecting it to
> NM and change the preferences to something simpler.
> any thoughts?

Yeah, maybe a "Usage" button in the 3G page of the connection editor
which opens a new dialog, with a button that would force-reset the
usage, and a calendar picker which you could set to a date + time to
automatically reset usage when your billing cycle resets.  And a "max
usage" spinner which, if you get within say 10% of which the applet
would warn you in yellow, 5% it would warn you in red, etc :)  Thinking
further, if you get within 1%, the applet could actually deny you the
ability to activate that 3G connection and nicely explain why, using a
picture of your mobile provider stealing a fat wad of cash out of a
small crying child's hands.

Dan

> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-02-17 at 13:18 -0500, Carlos Romero wrote:
> >> Is anybody still using the gnome modem lights applet for connecting
> >> and monitoring?
> >> the functionality seems to have been replaced by NetworkManager and
> >> the system monitor applet for a while now.
> >> Although I have never initiated a modem connection with NM, It's been
> >> so long that I forgot what the handshake sounded like.
> >> On a side note the monitor applet is not showing network activity but
> >> the application is, at least with 3g.
> >
> > For now, nm-applet doesn't have modem-lights support.  Partially that's
> > because the icon area is used for a lot of other stuff like signal
> > strength display too.  So especially for 3G modems, the current
> > modemlights icons just wouldn't work in combination with signal
> > strength.  If you want the modem lights stuff, the best option is to run
> > both modem-lights and nm-applet for now.
> >
> > An open bug (and something trivial to implement, if somebody wants to
> > I'm happy to explain how it should be done) is to track data transfer
> > totals for 3G devices in nm-applet.  NetworkManager already emits
> > signals on D-Bus for how much data the PPP interface has used; the
> > applet simply needs to listen for those and keep a running total in the
> > connection object in GConf, then have a "Reset Totals" button somewhere
> > in the connection editor for it.
> >
> > Dan
> >
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>