KDE 4.1 is out from not too much but feature addition for 4.2 are in a really fast pace already, by the way 4.2 will be the answer to Life, Universe and everything (ok, bad pun but couldn’t resist :P)

As for Plasma, the changelog published by a certain KDE hacker (welcome back Aaron:D) is already pretty impressive, i wanted to talk about a feature that should really clarify the why of a thinghie that is present in KDE 4.1:

...
Plasma Desktop Shell
--------------------
* Features
   * Panel
       * resizes itself when an applet changes its sizehint
           according to its maximum and minimum size
...

KDE 4.1 has the possibility to resize/edit/move the panel with a widget that pops up over it, to decide the size you use a thing that resembles the wordprocessor paragraph rules, and there are 3 of them, because you can decide the position, maximum and minimum size. The difference between the maximum and minimum sizes in kde 4.1 is used only when adding/removing applets.

Since some time (and writing about it only now because i’m laaazy:)) the new behaviour, that was the intended one since day zero is:

When you move the minimum slider, the panel resizes itself until a size it consider somewhat “optimal” to fit all its applets without whitespaces. When an applet wants to grow (or shrink) it notifies the panel, which will resize itself according the chosed maximum and minimum size.

The white slider instead represents the “origin point”, so for instance if you have the panel aligned to the left and the white slider moved by 100 pixels you will always be sure that the x coordinate of the panel will be 100 pixels, even if it grows or shrink.

Of course (well, at least i think:)) the default setup will still be a panel with 100% maximum and minimum width, so will look as now, but will be very easy to obtain different behaviours 🙂

This is a video that shows the standard panel that is being centered, grows and then shrinks:

Theora version