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The plasmoid interaction bar that shows up when you hover over a plasmoid is great - but the resize icon in there being the only way to resize a plasmoid has a couple of disadvantages. First of all, it's very disconnected from how users resize objects, and how they're used to resizing objects. New users are not going to grok how to resize a widget on their desktop, simply because it doesn't operate in a similar manner to how resizing usually works.
Secondly, it's difficult to get a plasmoid (the folder view plasmoid being the prime example) to the right size for the desired desktop layout by resizing it with the handle in the plasmoid hover bar. The resizing happens around the center of the plasmoid, which makes this difficult: to place and size a plasmoid appropriately, you have to move it, resize it, move it again a little, then resize it a little more, etc. pp., until you've got it in the exact position and at the size you wanted it in.

Suggestion: when hovering over a plasmoid with widgets unlocked, show the interaction bar as usual, but also fade in a resizing border around the plasmoid that makes it possible to resize the plasmoid by dragging edges and corners. Possibly even go a step further and use the 'outside' of the corners to rotate the plasmoid, similar to how rotating objects in OOO's presentation app works - that would be subject to some usability testing, though

In KDE 4.2.x, the resizing does not happen "around the center of the plasmoid" any more. This has been fixed.

Yeah, I saw that - but it's still difficult to place a plasmoid precisely since you can't grab any corner or edge; particularly if you want to increase the size downwards, you're pretty much out of luck and need to move the plasmoid first, then resize it upwards...

I think it would be much better if it worked something like this:

Alec wrote:I think it would be much better if it worked something like this:

Nice. Could you post your idea?

I'd like to have a better way to resize plasmoids too, but i don't like the 4 resize markers shown above, as it would imply that one can only resize diagonally and should be very careful if he wants to resize horizontally or vertically. I think that it should be possible instead to grab the plasmoid from any border just like any other window.

R_Rios wrote:

Alec wrote:I think it would be much better if it worked something like this:

Nice. Could you post your idea?

The way I see it. There is no need to post this as stand-alone idea.
As it's just another solution for original idea.
What's not allowed is multiple idea per topic not multiple solution of idea per topic.
I know that voting can get non-transparent if there are more than one solution per post.
Let's just say that we're still working on that.

Primoz wrote:

R_Rios wrote:

Alec wrote:I think it would be much better if it worked something like this:

Nice. Could you post your idea?

The way I see it. There is no need to post this as stand-alone idea.
As it's just another solution for original idea.
What's not allowed is multiple idea per topic not multiple solution of idea per topic.
I know that voting can get non-transparent if there are more than one solution per post.
Let's just say that we're still working on that.

+1 then.