I get some inconsistent behaviour from the "popups" from widgets attached to panels. Some widgets (such as Device Notifier and Quick Access) draw the plasma border nearest the panel and others (Folder View and Battery Monitor) do not.

This is not a huge issue of course but it is visually distracting when some popups are nicely rounded complete windows and other have an odd cut-off look. Especially when the cut-off edge of the popup isn't fully covered by the panel (I don't like full width panels).

Is there a way to force widgets to draw all four borders?

The Device Notifier behaves like the Power Management popup in Trunk currently. This is part of usability work I believe ( some principle I can't remember )

The popup to the right is an extender, so it can for example be dragged (in the "title bar) and dropped on the desktop if your widgets are unlocked. I don't know why the bottom border isn't drawn, but I hope that the extenders will look as if they 'grow out' of the panel in the future. See this early mockup for example.

So trunk is moving in the opposite direction from what I was looking for? Is there a usability expert around who can explain the reasoning behind this? I'm curious about things like this!

The plasmoids also look better when it looks like they pop out of the panel. You may wish to ask on the Plasma development list if adding the border when the panel is not underneath the section in question, which I think would be a good impasse.

bcooksley wrote:You may wish to ask on the Plasma development list [...]

Stupid question: Is that the "Developers / Interface & Design" forum or is there a separate forum for Plasma developers somewhere?

I think bcooksley was referring to the mailing list, which is plasma-devel@kde.org. If you find it too troublesome to subscribe, I think you can just send a mail to the list and ask them to CC you on replies.

I don't believe it! I just found this at the top of the list of new items at kde-apps.org:
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Fl ... ent=100766

Pretty much exactly what I was looking for!

Glad to hear you managed to find a solution. You may wish to file a feature request at bugs.kde.org requesting that the Extender has a border drawn on the bottom if it sticks out over the edge of the panel.