Caffeine Awake Timer

[Hurricane Computers]

Hello,

I've been a long-time user of Caffeine, and loved the ability to keep
a machine awake for a period of time (15 minutes, 1 hour, etc).

I recently reinstalled my os, and I can't find that functionality in
the new version. Was it removed? Can you put it back in?

Thanks!

[Tommy Brunn]

That functionality was removed in whatever release it was where the app indicator was introduced. The reason being that app indicators can't have submenus, so there was no apparent elegant UI solution that worked in all supported environments.

I'm not that involved in the development of Caffeine anymore, so I'm not sure if the app indicators allow for submenus yet. If they do, patches are welcome to reintroduce that functionality. From a user survey we did quite a while back, we found that most people use the automatic activation or manually manage Caffeine. That's why the timed activation was removed, rather than reworked using the UI options available.

[Hurricane Computers]

Hello Tommy,

Ok, if the objective is to avoid sub-menus for compatability reasons,
and to avoid too much clutter in the menu, maybe just add a single
1hour button. I really only use it to temporarily disable the
automatic lock when I'm sure I'll be working for a while. For this
reason, I'd really like to time-bound my vulnerability (so I don't
forget to re-enable), and so a simple enable/disable button is not
sufficient.

Python is not my primary development language, and while I'd be happy
to write a patch, I'm not familiar with any of your code and/or
development processes. It might be faster/cleaner if one of you could
make the fix. If you still feel that a user-contrib would be hepful
in this case, let me know, and I'll try to submit something this
evening.

Thanks!

On Sep 10, 8:03 am, Tommy Brunn <tommy.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
> That functionality was removed in whatever release it was where the app
> indicator was introduced. The reason being that app indicators can't have
> submenus, so there was no apparent elegant UI solution that worked in all
> supported environments.
>
> I'm not that involved in the development of Caffeine anymore, so I'm not
> sure if the app indicators allow for submenus yet. If they do, patches are
> welcome to reintroduce that functionality. From a user survey we did quite a
> while back, we found that most people use the automatic activation or
> manually manage Caffeine. That's why the timed activation was removed,
> rather than reworked using the UI options available.

[Tommy Brunn]

Unfortunately, my Linux environment has been rendered unusable at the moment, so I'm relegated to Windows for the time being (and Caffeine doesn't run in Windows). I haven't touched the code for the current revision of Caffeine, but I believe it's fairly straight-forward, if you want to try to implement that feature. Ideally, I'd see an added option in the preferences, so that the user can choose for herself how long the timed activation should last for. But, of course, this initial sprint can be a fixed setting. 

If you want to implement it, create a new branch based on trunk, develop and test your changes, and then create a merge request (may be called something else in launchpad. It's been a while since I used it). While I believe I have upload rights, I have zero involvement with packaging and haven't got the slightest clue what kind of package build scripts may be set up. Isaiah Heyer is the current maintainer of Caffeine, so hopefully he'll read this and get in touch. If not, you can try to email him directly through his Launchpad profile: https://launchpad.net/~bnsmith/+contactuser He's taken care of the PPA, so he should be able to handle the merge and pushing new packages.

Cheers,

Tommy