Or having a notification escalation level that has the notification only closed when the user actually clicks the close button.
I regularly forget to turn on my power strip, so I see the alerts sometimes. If I miss them because I was AFK, my notebook does a loud speaker beep 1/s. Unfortunately, my battery is so far gone, that I have to race for the switch: after the 3rd beep it’s dead. 
Yes that’s what I was aiming for, too.
Ideally configurable in the power settings, e.g. when to raise a warning, when to hibernate and auto power off. It’s common in other OS’s and works quite well, so no need to innovate here 
Thanks for the discussion, everyone. I’ve submitted an enhancement ticket.
We could simply increase the timeout for this specific notification I think. Setting it to a few hours would make sure the battery empties before the notification is hidden?
After playing with ‘notify’, I think sticking with – persistent – notifications would be OK. There should be some striking icon to attract attention. (Why, BTW, is there now always a default “App” icon in the panel? Seems to be new in Beta 2. I don’t think it adds anything.)
Not sure the early-warning notification should be completely persistent – 15 minutes or so should be enough. Otherwise the user might get annoyed always having to dismiss it when they were well aware of the situation…
In the Trac ticket (#16324) Humdinger suggests a ‘progress bar’, showing current battery level, which would help even more, I think.
It uses the icon from the application sending the notification, but the notify command line tool has none and ends up with the generic icon.
Ahh. Makes sense, now. Thanks.
@Zenja: Ha ha - yeah, that brings back the old days. Sync, sync, sync. Never was a fan of write caching beyond a few seconds.
What if someone could have a little app or applet, replicant, or whatever that didn’t rely on ACPI or what the hardware was telling Haiku, like where someone could set their own battery timer – it wouldn’t be accurate of course, but it’d be a way to have a solid timer from 100 to 0 (like if someone knew their battery lasted ~ 2 hours for example) and then said tool could save the list of open applications and power down once things got ‘critical’ – it’d be an idea 
anyway 
What if i compile things which is extremely power hungry, how can i trust this timer? How could this solve ANY actual problem?
Well hopefully if you’re going to do a large compile job, do intensive graphics stuff, etc hopefully you’ll be plugged into an outlet But, ideally… the plan would be that it’d have an option in a preferences box or whatever to take CPU utilization into account, so if an application/team was using a good amount of power, it could adjust the time scale (so in my example, it’d go from thinking 2 hours to 1:30 with current usage at 100% or so on depending on usage like if it averaged 75%) much like a file copying meter changes its estimates. When power usage returned to normal, it could subtract the difference from the time spent in ‘high performance’ and from there continue at ‘normal’ use. But – that’d be an option; the user could also do a straight countdown from full to empty like I first posted, but that’s assuming casual usage…
But even with the options in there, it’s true that even by trying to guess from CPU use, it definitely wouldn’t be reliable or accurate as a real reading – and so for the usual laptop, netbook, notebook, or whatever ‘portable’ form factor out there, yes, PowerStatus 
would remain the best choice. But – for the Raspberry Pi 
(which can be used in mobile projects with soldered in or external batteries), cheap aftermarket batteries off eBay (that I have found vary in quality and actual run time), or where Haiku can’t get a totally accurate “lock” on the battery (like where PowerStatus might think 10% is left when there’s 5% because of a weird battery setup), it’d be a good fallback tool and I guess better than nothing. But then again, that’s just an idea I had… not anything anyone would have to use.
As it nearly happened again, though this time the power connector clattered on the floor an hour after it came out, so I caught it before death, I was thinking…
How about a notification if external power goes away for any reason? Don’t think that would be an irritation at all, and would catch a few of those otherwise annoying accidents! I’d think most of the code would be there already.
Sounds like a good enhancement ticket. Or even a code submimssion at Gerrit? 