Originally Posted by vijayv

@josh : great work dude, had wanted this fixed from day one. Especially useful while receiving calls from land line. Many a time people ask for some detail and you move away from the phone app. And power button menu is the exact place for it , really good for one hand operation.

Originally Posted by vijayv

@Slender: where did you come up with the 90% statistic ? Some people just tend to assume everyone else does things just the way they do.

--Vj

Originally Posted by josh

I make use of multitasking while on the phone relatively often, to look something up; even more often now that I have a Bluetooth earpiece. Recent example, when calling my wireless carrier: "Do you have a land-line I can call you back on so you can get the IMEI from your phone?" "Actually, I can look that up while on the phone; one moment please." Menu -> Settings -> About product, ... (They could use the IMEI to look up the phone's capabilities to tell me whether it could successfully roam on their network.)

However, I didn't create the "End call" option for myself; I just switch back to the phone app and end the call. The person I created this option for doesn't really multitask, though they do leave programs running sometimes. However, more than once they've somehow ended up with the screen blanked but a call active (still not quite sure how), and in this situation the phone doesn't give any visible indication of an active call, leading to a request for some way to ensure that the phone is off.

Potential hardware designers, take note: hardware "answer" and "end call" buttons considered essential for some users. And considering the N900's screen has a significant gap between the right edge and the bezel...

Originally Posted by vijayv

@josh : great work dude, had wanted this fixed from day one. Especially useful while receiving calls from land line. Many a time people ask for some detail and you move away from the phone app. And power button menu is the exact place for it , really good for one hand operation.

Originally Posted by josh

Implementing the "End call" menu item took a fair bit of exploration and experimentation, so I want to document how it works as an example for how to implement more complex power-key menu items that use D-Bus and keyfile-based visibility.

Code:

<powerkeymenu path="/">
 <menuitem priority="10" name="End call" visible="yes">
  <keyfile>/var/run/mce/call</keyfile>
  <icon>red_end_call</icon>
  <callback service="com.nokia.csd.Call" path="/com/nokia/csd/call" interface="com.nokia.csd.Call" method="Release" bus="system">
  </callback>
 </menuitem>
</powerkeymenu>

A power-button menu file uses XML, and requires a root tag of <powerkeymenu path="/">.

The "End call" item uses a <menuitem> tag, and name="End call" attribute specifies the text that appears in the menu item. (I should really add a <po> tag in the <menuitem> so that this uses the same localized text for "End call" that the Phone UI does.)

priority="10" determines where the item appears in the power button menu. Smaller numbers appear earlier in the menu. priority 10 makes "End call" appear before all the existing defined menu items.

<keyfile>/var/run/mce/call</keyfile> and the visible="yes" attribute on the <menuitem> make the "End call" button only appear when on a call. The file /var/run/mce/call contains "yes" when on a call and "no" when not on a call; visible="yes" says to make this item visible only when the keyfile contains "yes".

The <icon> tag specifies the icon; red_end_call corresponds to the icon used by the phone UI.

<callback> says to make a D-Bus call when running this menu item. The method com.nokia.csd.Call.Release will end the current call. (Everything I've found says that I should use Telepathy calls for this instead, but I haven't found the right D-Bus interface to use for that; suggestions welcome.) Since the Release method doesn't take any arguments, I don't have to specify any <argument> elements inside the <callback>.

I still don´t get this completely. AFAIK Phone blanks after call if opposite disconnects you or if you press disconnect. Are we dealing with 40+ old users here