In the last weeks not many “visible” things were done on Plasma, because we were all busybusybusy with the ginormous api changes and plasma breaking and unbreaking several times :D. As you can see the list has been nearly completely vanished, oh boy, can’t really believe we did it in so little time, my best congratulations to the whole team that worked so hard 🙂
So now the development of new hot features can start again, oh yeah 😀
At the moment I’m working on two little things, one involves svg theming of every aspect of the panel, like the taskbar and the systray, of course powered by Nuno 🙂 more on that in the future when it will be more ready, will keep teasing for now, eheh 🙂
The other thing is that little nifty cashew that infestates the panel since some time and didn’t do anything: with a today commit it has actually came to life 🙂
until now you can configure the panel size by right-clicking on an empty spot on the panel (that is not always present), and an ugly dialog is presented to you, were you must enter the panel size in pixels.
One of the key concept of KDE4 is to give you more control with actually LESS buttons and clumsy configuration options, and Plasma must be no different. Imagine for instance how lame would appear dolphin if for configuring the sidebar icons size you would have to right click on the sidebar and then enter the icons size in pixels? Instead you have a wonderful fluid looking
resize upon drag of the sidebar separator that looks really hot.
Getting inspiration from that (and from Aaron’s good advices eheh :D) when you click on the little cashew you’re presented to this, here with kwin composite awesomeness:
There are still some necessary buttons, at the moment add widgets and remove panel, there will also be some about the “panel alignment”, that is a concept i’ll blog here in some time when i will have something more definite. To resize the panel you simply drag the upper border of the thingie that appearded, like a normal window, nothing more nothing less.
Its functionality is still incomplete, in some time it will have also a mean to resize the panel width, the position and the location (the centered panel of the screenshot can only be obtained by tweaking
configuration files by now but it’s definitely possible :D).
All of that by drag and drop. Hint: it will have something to do with wordprocessors rulers, because, i’ll explain more, deciding where the panel will go is a process totally like formatting a paragraph in a document.
That’s all great; if I may formulate a feature request, that’d be an option to set the text size on the panel (I think that existed in 4.0). Right now it seems to be following the size chosen in kcmfonts, which is a sane default, but I think it’d be nice to allow to override that by a custom size. I like very small text in the task manager so more fits, and so I can have a very thin panel.
Wow, that looks nifty.
Will there be little handles in the extension or something to allow moving the applets around? Or is this already possible, and I’m just blind?
Hi Mart , great work as always!
Can you give some information about centering the lenght resized panel with the conf file. I’m trying to do this without success , and I’m waiting for this feature from a lot of month, I really miss it very much , Thank you!
Benoit Jacob: hmm, don’t know see the problem of the ton of micro options that rages in again… should be done with some kind of authomation at least..
David B.: at the moment it’s not possible, wonder if this thing will trigger them or not, don’t know if will are in for 4.1, but it’s planned for sure..
mangus: you first need to make the panel less wide than the screen, and then adding in plasmarc a thing like that:
[PlasmaViews][2]
Offset=100
100 or the number of pixels you want the panel to be moved
omg , it works! I’ve been waiting fir this a lot! thank you very much!
Why not resize by clicking and dragging the edges of the panel, rather than the ‘thingie’? Normal windows don’t have extra ‘thingies’ to resize them.
Nonetheless, rly looking forward to plasma panel. When cashew is clicked, will we be able to rearrange applets like icons, kickoff etc..?