Created attachment 5133 make lid closed conditional on !docked The weather applet employs "power saving" measures when the laptop lid is closed, such as disabling the scrollbox. This makes it mostly useless to me, since I can look out the window to see the weather more accurately than the icon, but not the temperature. I, like many people I know, use my laptop as a desktop computer most of the time, with an externally connected monitor and the lid closed. When in this mode, I do not want the weather applet (or anything else, for that matter) to reduce its functionality. Please either provide an option to disable lid detection, or at least require !IsDocked as well (preferably both). The docked requirement is a trivial change; I have attached that (but feel free to ignore my patch, of course). This might break for some people, since upower uses an undocumented, subject to change without notice, heuristic to decide if the machine is docked. For me, it appears to toggle based on whether or not the HDMI connector is attached.
Thanks for the patch. I will consider what to do about that upower stuff before releasing the next version. Maybe removing those lid checks and only checking for battery would be the better option anyway. Note however that you can turn off power saving completely using a hidden option as written at the end of the README file.
Created attachment 5134 Make power save option work on startup
Ah, yes. Sorry for not reading the README file. I'm used to most modern software being fully documented by some sparse HTML file somewhere (e.g. the project page), and having nothing more than license info in the README, so I didn't check. That said, I have attached an another patch, which also fixes the fact that the above-mentioned config option is ignored on startup (it sort of conflicts with the first, but still applies with fuzz). The option appears to default to false, so I didn't actually need to set it to get what I wanted. I think that having this option meets my request for a config option, so this is sufficient, even if it is a bit difficult to set the option (I blame xfce4-panel, though: it should provide the config options via xfce4-settings-editor somehow, so users can at least sanely find and edit the config option).
Er, actually, the second patch doesn't work, since the config hasn't been read in yet. Sorry about that. I'm sure you knew that, anyway, so I'll just stop sending patches for now...
Fixed in http://git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-weather-plugin/commit/?id=a2e5010a08c014802157788a50c30ec97e271dba. I decided to solve this by making the code simpler and removing all stuff dealing with the laptop lid, thus only relying on battery/AC status for powersaving. This way, there won't be compatibility issues in cases where hardware support is buggy.