Move your applets freely!

Ok kinda blogging-by-proxy ahead 😉

Starting with commit 827860 you can move applets in your panel. \o/   This will be included in KDE 4.1 final.

And for those who say seeing is believing here is a short video showing it ;-)  (Planet readers might need to visit my blog to see it.)

Quote of the day: “Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress” — Ted Levitt

27 thoughts on “Move your applets freely!”

  3. This is excellent! Do you happen to know if we will be seeing some sort of applet resize within the panel next? For example, the digital clock applet would be able to be resized so as to change how big the text is.

    Thanks for the reporting and your reply. 🙂

  4. @SSJ; Thanks. Excellent 🙂

    @AIC: I am sure it will not be in 4.1 as it is feature froozen now. I don’t know if it is planned for 4.2.

  6. Great! I’ve been waiting for that!

    And it seems to, by only judging from the video, work a lot more straight-forward than the OpenSuse 11 approach (which is, naturally enough, rendered inoperable if you use the factory repo to stay on the bleeding edge…and incapable of moving a widget from the desktop to the taskbar IIRC. I don’t intend to downgrade from 4.0.85 to 4.0.4 just to refresh my memory…)

  7. This looks really great. What one could add (maybe after 4.1): the other applets could slide smoothly instead of “jump” when you move the applet to the other side.

  11. Suses solution is so much simpler. How should the user know he has to click on ‘configure panel’ first to move icons? He’s got no visual guidance whatsoever…the implementation seems pretty unintuitive to me.

  12. @Fish: I disagree. The same can be said about openSUSE’s implementation. It isn’t intuitive that you have to right click on an applet to move it either. It is just what you have used and became accustomed to. Having all configuration in one place makes so much more sense.

  13. The configuration is not in one place at the moment: Removing and configuration of panel applets is done without the panel controller.

  14. “It isn’t intuitive that you have to right click on an applet to move it either.”

    Oh yes, it’s actually very intuitive. I bet more than 80% of the users would try right-clicking on a panel applet when they want to move it. But then there’s no such option…

    “It is just what you have used and became accustomed to.”

    …which is exactly the point. Why change it if the new solution is not better anyway?

    “Having all configuration in one place makes so much more sense.”

    Do you consider the placement of applets part of the panel configuration? Not me, sorry…

  15. “…which is exactly the point. Why change it if the new solution is not better anyway?”

    Uhmmm… It was a patch openSUSE introduced. Nothing upstream did. So no change for anyone but openSUSE users. Upstream decided to implement it differently. Their choice and only a problem for openSUSE users. If at all a problem.

  16. That’s your opinion. Mine is that it would have been better to use the Opensuse patches in upstream as they have chosen a much better solution.

    And yes, suboptimal placement of applets is a problem for all users that can’t find the option where they expect it and not only for Opensuse users…

  17. Have you looked at the patch?
    It might be entirely broken. It might not be compatible with 4.1. And so on and so on. There are a lot of good reasons to not use a patch even if the thing it does is perfect. (Not saying I agree though.)

  18. Looks really good.
    Only thing missing for me is notification area (where things like uTorrent and kmix dock theirsleves) configuration to allow me to hide some icons that I rarely use as kwallet, and kmix. 🙂

  19. Fish,

    As much as I love OpenSuSE, that patch just isn’t good enough for a couple of reasons (I leave out the inuitiveness of it since that is to a large extent subjective).

    No, my reasons are as follows:

    1. As it is now, it is too damn picky about when it thinks the right-click to drop it is gonna work. There were several things I wanted to move that I had to move several times before I got it where I wanted it to be.
    2. It is limited to moving things within the same panel. I have two plus the main desktop. If I wanted to move say the trashcan from the default bottom panel to my new one at the top the SuSE patch would be useless, and I would need to add the trashcan to the top one and then remove the original one.
    3. Finally, it can’t move everything. Try to move the systray for one…although to be granted, I have no way (yet) of knowing whether this approach will allow that either.

    Apart from the having to use “configure panel” first, it seems pretty straight-forward. Just the usual drag-and-drop, which I dare-say very few computer users would have a problem with. And if a lot of users complain about how this is implemented I’m sure a better solution will find itself into a post-4.1 release.

    And I think I recall one of the SuSE devs saying the patch was only intended to be a temporary solution.

  21. Hello Lydia,

    I took the liberty of linking this entry to the Plasma FAQ, since it shows both applet moving and insertion on the panel.

    If this causes problems, I’ll put a direct link to the video. Thanks.

  23. Thanks, that was really really missing in 4.1 til now! But I hate this big panel-configuration-dialog. Has it to take the whole screen-width? I think this could be handled in another way much more beautiful and comfortable.

  24. @Dieter: Not everything can be perfect in 4.1. We need to leave room for improvement in 4.2, 4.3 and so on 😛

  25. @Collinm: Fedora 9 has that too. But we will switch to the new upstream solution in the KDE 4.1 update which is coming soon.

    Lydia wrote:
    > Have you looked at the patch?
    > It might be entirely broken. It might not be compatible with 4.1.

    It wasn’t, but I ported it to 4.1 a few days ago and the current Fedora Rawhide KDE 4.0.84 packages have that patch. But of course it makes no sense to keep carrying it now, so we’ll drop it in favor of the upstream solution.

  26. Thank you very much, I was really waiting for this feature! 😀
    Putting it in Panel Settings is OK for me.

  27. Thank you for your comments. I have only a vague idea of what Plasma does. However, it seems like a good idea to be able to take components and put them wherever you need it the most. Since I learn best by watching and doing, I would be interested in finding a demonstration on Plasma. Better yet, I am hoping that I can upgrade my KDE 3.4 on Red Hat Fedora 4 to KDE 4.1 and experience the differences for myself.

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