Until this morning, resizing plasma applets meant maintaining the aspect ratio. There was no way to make them wider without changing the height, or vice versa, without manually editing the plasma config file.
Well, if you are running trunk, you can now freely resize applets by holding CTRL while resizing. This won’t make it to 4.0.0 (which has already been tagged), but all the current fixes in plasma should be backported to the 4.0 branch before we move on to 4.1 development. So it should make it to 4.0.1, which is good as it’s quite an important feature for certain plasmoids.
Also, I’ve greatly improved the Now Playing applet:
The text size will stretch to fit the height of the applet and, if the text doesn’t fit the width of the applet, any excess text will be ellided:
This is why I needed free resizing…
Tags: applet handles, now playing
5th January 2008 at 1:45 pm |
That’s great. The Now playing engine is something really great!
I think that in now playing case, resizing should work in a different way. In my opinion long text should be scrolling so you could see all of it.
This is my 2 cents opinion.
Dario
5th January 2008 at 2:19 pm |
The reason I didn’t go with that was that there have been CPU usage issues with scrolling text, as demonstrated by the news ticker applet.
If I can do it without hammering the system, then I’ll go for it. But it’s better like this than changing the text size for every song, in my opinion.
Actually, if the scrolling was a character every second (or half-second) rather than “smooth” scrolling, that would probably work.
5th January 2008 at 2:30 pm |
Hallelujah! Down with the aspect ratio chains! We are free!!!
5th January 2008 at 2:31 pm |
[...] should also be raised hasn’t been decided afaik. new thing in today’s plasma: thanks to Alex, holding ctrl while resizing allows you to change the aspect ratio. dunno how this actually works [...]
5th January 2008 at 4:44 pm |
This is good but why don’t use the same behaviour many graphical apps have? Generally holding CTRL while resizing is used to KEEP the aspect ratio, I think it would be more usable to resize plasma applets the same way, what do you think about it?
5th January 2008 at 4:54 pm |
Actually, I was thinking that a separate “resize” button would be best. So the rotate button would only rotate, and the resize button would resize freely, but you could hold CTRL to keep the aspect ratio.
This, really, was just a simple way to allow free resizing without changing existing behaviour.
5th January 2008 at 6:40 pm |
@Racchio: +1, my opinion too
5th January 2008 at 8:47 pm |
What about this; http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Libs/Modifier_keys
9th June 2008 at 7:43 am |
I’m trying to implement my own widget, and I’ve gotten some inspiration from nowplaying. But the version in KDE 4.0.80 doesn’t seem to include the patch you’re talking about here.
Where can I get it? I want my plasmoid to resize nicely as well.
If you can point me to any resources that’d be great!
9th June 2008 at 8:39 am |
@Dennis:
Plasma has changed substantially since I wrote this, because of the inclusion of widgets-on-canvas in Qt 4.4. Having just finished my exams, I’m still catching up with recent plasma developments.
I’d suggest #plasma on IRC (irc.freenode.org) for asking questions.
9th June 2008 at 9:51 am |
Thanks a lot!
Good for you, my exams are just coming up…
and good luck with the results!