News report about BatteryBar on golem.de

[Chanz]

Hi there,
I just want to let your know that there is a news report on the german website golem.de, about BatteryBar.

http://www.golem.de/1005/75033.html

google translation use the orginal link for the video and images.

cya

[Chris]

I noticed that. That report drove a huge amount of traffic to the site, about 3-4 times the usually amount of traffic and about 2x the usual number of Pro license sales.

I have no idea what they were saying on the video demo, but it looks like they were mostly talking about the discharge rate. I'm surprised that they didn't show the version of BatteryBar running with the German translation.

[Guest]

No, Chris,
the video is only a quick tour through BB's features.
Text parts on golem.de present more details: "....in theory BB reports increasing battery's damage, a feature that didn't work on our HP 2710p. Only info we got was our battery is no longer fully charged at the end of charging process. Unfortunately number of charging cycles isn't presented at all..."
".....a 2nd problem we observed is that BB gets mixed up when 2 batteries are used simultaneously: BB reports unrealistic data then. In this case users better use built in Win tools instead........"
Klaus

[Chris]

I can dispute the last claim. I develop BatteryBar on a laptop with two batteries and it works fine. The issue is that it needs time to generate a battery profile for the second battery. While only the first battery is being discharging, if there's no data for the second battery it doesn't know how long it's going to last.

I'm working on a solution where if the second battery doesn't have a battery profile yet, it'll just use the "simple" time remaining estimate for that battery until sufficient data is collected to provide the better estimate.

Regarding charge cycles, most batteries don't report that data so I haven't made the effort to display it anywhere.

[SaltyDog]

The article is poor. They do not mentioned the statistical time estimation for the battery, which is for me one of the main important features. They mainly mention the discharge rate. Due to that in the comments of the news most users doesn't see the benefit of your tool ("as useless as a fifth wheel").

[Chris]

I've tried to make it quite explicit on the website that the statistical time remaining is the main feature. Maybe I need to throw in some pictures of the new battery profile graphs as demonstrations of the profile feature.