Kontact Suite

September and October in KDE PIM

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 19:25:00 +0000

Here's our bi-monthly update from KDE's personal information management applications team. This report covers progress made in September and October 2024.

Since the last report, 24 people have contributed over 1100 changes to the KDE PIM code base. We also released a two bugfix releases of the KDE PIM Suite with the Gear releases 24.08.1 and 24.08.2

Please note this is the last bi-monthly blog post for KDE PIM. We will continue to work on KDE PIM but weekly improvements to KDE PIM are now included in the This Week in KDE Apps blog.

Akademy

The KDE PIM team was at Akademy from the 7th to the 12th of September in Würzburg (Germany). We hosted again a PIM BoF.

We covered a few topics and made plans. In particular we touched upon contributions blockers, we hope the milestone system will help and also working on the amount of repositories which are not part of KDE Frameworks. Things are progressing in the right direction but slowly. Feel free to reach out to help!

Milestones

Talking about the milestones. You can see what we got in store on the Gitlab board. Some of them are progressing nicely like the resurrection of Kontact for Windows or the port away from QCA.

If you see anything you fancy and you would like to help, reach out to us on the #kontact:kde.org Matrix channel!

Applications

Itinerary

Our travel assistance app Itinerary got a new two-level trip/timeline view, an extended public transport location search, a new full trip map view and better Android platform integration. Read more in its own bi-monthly update.

KAlarm

David has been working on fixing bugs around sound handling. In particular, repeating audio alarms only playing once have been fixed. Likewise the failure to play sound files using libVLC on some systems is gone. Also the backend to play sound can be changed at build time, it can use VLC or MPV.

But that's not the only bugs which got squashed. It's now possible to wake from suspend when using RTC wake and a crash has been fixed affecting systems where the kernel supports alarm timers.

Last but not least, the GUI has been improved around the run mode options in the preferences dialog.

Merkuro

Claudio has been busy fixing regressions and improving the stability of Merkuro. Notably, maps are now displayed again (if the event contains coordinates). Also, the collection combobox in the editors are now initialized with a valid collection and filtering features have been repaired.

KAddressBook and KOrganizer

The general improvements to support Plasma Activities is still on going. It is not enabled by default as it requires Akonadi Resources support to become really useful and the corresponding changes are not there yet.

KMail

On the KMail front the search has been greatly improved. There is now a custom syntax usable in the search text field. One can now use keywords like subject:, body:, to, from, has:attachment, is:important, is:replied and so on to make more precise queries.

For instance one could write "from:vkrause@kde.org to:kde-pim@kde.org is:important" to get only the emails from Volker on the kde-pim mailing list which are also flagged as important.

July and August in KDE PIM

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 19:20:00 +0000

Here's our bi-monthly update from KDE's personal information management applications team. This report covers progress made in July and August 2024.

Since the last report, 32 people have contributed over 1300 changes to the KDE PIM code base. We also released a new version of the KDE PIM Suite in August with the Gear release

Akademy

The KDE PIM team will be at Akademy from the 7th to the 12th of September in Würzburg (Germany). We will host again a PIM BoF on Monday from 14h to 16h.

Milestones

We have decided to plan and track our work in milestones. Milestones represent concrete goals with clear definitions of what we understand as done, and be achievable within a reasonable time frame. Each milestone is then split into smaller bite-sized tasks that can be worked on independently.

This helps us prioritize important work, make our progress more visible and, most importantly, make it easier for people to get excited about what we are working on. New contributors will also be able to pick a well-defined task and start contributing to PIM.

You can see the milestones on our Gitlab board. If anything there catches your eye and you would like to help, reach out to us on the #kontact:kde.org Matrix channel!

Retiring KJots and KNotes

We made some progress on this front and KNotes was not part of the 24.08 release. The repositories for KNotes and KJots are now archived and the remaining bits related to the Akonadi Note support were removed from KOrganizer, Calendar Support, KDE PIM Runtime, and Event Views.

Moving Protocol Implementations to KDE Frameworks

Volker continued to cleanup and optimize KMime in preparation for moving it to the KDE Frameworks. KMime is the library used to parse and write emails.

Itinerary

Our travel assistant app Itinerary got a new seat information display in the timeline, integration with the Träwelling check-in service, more use of Wikidata/Wikimedia online content and a pretty new website. See its own bi-monthly update for more details.

Kleopatra

Over the last two months the smart card views for the different types of supported smart cards got a facelift to make them look more unified and less crowded (T7018).

Kleopatra now supports disabling OpenPGP certificates (T7216). This is sometimes useful to prevent accidentally using a certificate for encryption.

We improved the usability in

signing and encryption (T6485, T7183, T7236),
the list of certifications that now only shows the relevant ones (T7231),
the certificate group configuration (T6966),
changing the expiration of subkeys (T7198, T7215).

Akregator

Akregator is the RSS feed reader integrated into Kontact. Laurent reimplemented the filter bar to avoid multiple clicks and it is now similar to the one from Thunderbird.

Akregator now supports Plasma Activities so you can select which feeds are visible depending on the activity you are in. Similar functionalities are planned for KMail, KOrganizer and KAddressBook.

Finally, Akregator now has a What's New dialog showing the changes from the last version.

KMail

KMail now uses less memory by only loading some widgets when needed.

MimeTreeParser/Merkuro

We have unified the verification message for signed messages between Kleopatra, KMail and Merkuro by moving the implementation to LibKleo.

KAlarm

We replaced the libcanberra audio backend with VLC, since libcanberra is unmaintained and does not recognise recent audio formats. There is also the option for distributions to use MPV as audio backend.

May and June in KDE PIM

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Here's our bi-monthly update from KDE's personal information management applications team. This report covers progress made in the months of May and June 2024.

Since the last report 38 people have contributed over 1500 changes to KDE PIM code base.

PIM Sprint

Let's start with the biggest event of the last two months: the PIM sprint!

The team met in Toulouse for a weekend of discussions, hacking and French pastries. You can read reports from Kevin, Carl, Dan and Volker on their blogs to get all the nitty gritty.

In this report, we will cover the biggest topics that were discussed and worked on during the sprint.

Milestones

We have decided to plan and track our work in milestones. Milestones should represent a concrete goal with clear definitions of what we understand as done, and be achievable within a reasonable time frame. Each milestone is then split into smaller bite-sized tasks that can be worked on independently.

This will help us prioritize important work, make our progress more visible and, most importantly, make it easier for people to get excited about what we are working on. New contributors will also be able to pick up a well-defined task and start contributing to PIM.

You can see the milestones on our Gitlab board - if anything there catches your eye and you would like to help, reach out to us on the #kontact:kde.org Matrix channel!

This report, as well as future ones will try to focus on the current milestones and their progress, hopefully making them more exciting to read :)

Retiring KJots and KNotes

We have decided to retire the KJots and KNotes applications. These applications have not seen any support or development in many years and are not in a state that we feel comfortable shipping to our users. With the introduction of Marknote, KDE can now offer a modern, well-maintained note-taking application that we can recommend users to migrate to. The latest release of Marknote has gained support for importing notes from KJots and KNotes, so no notes will be lost.

Polished Tag Support

Tags were introduced into KDE PIM many, many years ago, but they have never reached their full potential. We have decided to change that and make tags a first-class citizen in our applications. The first step is making sure that tags are actually usable, so we started by implementing automatic extraction of tags from events and todos and syncing them into local iCal calendars and remote DAV calendars. Thanks to this, you can now sync tags between KOrganizer and NextCloud, for example.

Moving Protocol Implementations to KDE Framworks

We have libraries in KDE PIM that implement various standards and protocols. By moving them to KDE Frameworks we make them independent from KDE PIM and thus available to anyone who wants to use them. In the past we have moved KCalendarCore (iCal support library) and KContacts (vCard support library) to Frameworks. We are now working on moving KMime (email/RFC822 support library) and KIMAP (IMAP protocol implementations) to Frameworks as well.

This is helping cleanup KMime. KMime APIs is now in many places const correct to avoid the risk of modifying a message when reading it, proper CamelCase headers are now generated like for all the KDE Frameworks. Finally, parsing a MIME file is now up to 10 times faster on typical emails.

Other Improvements and Fixes

Itinerary

Our travel assistant app Itinerary gained support for the public transport routing service Transitous, got a new import staging area and can now create new entries directly from OSM elements. For more details see its own summary blog post.

Merkuro

"Snow flurry" fixed the start of the week math for locales that use Sunday as the first day of the week. They also fixed the navigation of the basic mode for the month view and week view (which are used on mobile).

Claudio continued working on the Merkuro Mail application and added a progress bar in the sidebar which appears when a background job is running.

The settings dialogs have been ported to the new KirigamiAddons.ConfigurationView which fixes some issues on mobile.

Get Involved

If you would like to get involved in KDE PIM, check our milestones board and pick a task! And don't forget to join us in the #kontact:kde.org Matrix channel or the kde-pim mailing list!

March and April in KDE PIM

Tue, 07 May 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Here's our bi-monthly update from KDE's personal information management applications team. This report covers progress made in the months of March and April 2024.

Since the last report, 36 people contributed more than 1300 code changes. Most of the changes will be available in the coming KDE Gear 24.05 release.

Akonadi

When Akonadi stores the timestamp of when a database entry has been last modified, the conversion from user's local time zone to UTC and back now works correctly regardless of the database engine used BKO#483060.

KOrganizer

KOrganizer has received a number of bug fixes:

Fixed parsing of events with all-day recurrence rules (BKO#483707)
KOrganizer now correctly tracks active (selected) tasks in the ToDo View (BKO#485185)
Creating a new event from the date navigator in top left corner uses the correct date now (BKO#483823)
Custom filters for event views in KOrganizer work again (BKO#484040)
Improved handling of calendar colors
The iCal Resource now correclty handles iCal calendars generated by Google Calendar, which previously caused an endless loop and high CPU usage by the Akonadi iCal Resource (BKO#384309)
The ToDo view in the KOrganizer side-bar now works even when the Todo View isn't open
The "Custom Pages" settings page, which didn't worked for years, have been removed
Fixed a crash on exit after the Settings dialog was opened (BKO#483336)

g10 Code has kindly sponsored Dan's work on those bug fixes and improvements.

Kontact

Fixed name of UI element being too long (Hide/Show Sidebar) (BKO#484599)

KMail

Fixed a regression in the message composer that caused attachments to not get automatically encrypted when encrypting a message (T7059)
Fixed not translated shortcut (BKO#484281)
Fixed Monochromatic icons in system tray not always used (BKO#484420)
Fixed some not extracted i18n string (BKO#484186)
Allow to change print layout when we export as pdf (BKO#480733)
Fixed KMail unexpectedly trying to connect to safebrowsing.googleapis.com (BKO#483283)
Fixed KMail's config dialog taking a long time to show up (BKO#484328)

Identity Management

A new feature will arrive in 24.08: Plasma-Activities support (only Linux). So these class were adapted for supporting it. A check was added in KMail/Akregator/Knotes/KAddressbook, all work is in progress at the moment.

Kleopatra

The certificate details (user IDs, subkeys, certifications, etc.) are now shown in a single window. Additionally, information about the smart cards a certificate is stored on is now shown.

Further improvements are:

The creation of OpenPGP certificates was simplified by replacing the complicated advanced settings with a simple selection of the algorithm and the validity period.
If the search for certificates on a server takes longer, a progress dialog shows that the search is still ongoing. If no certificates are found, a corresponding message is shown instead of just showing an empty list of results. (T6493)
Certificates stored on TCOS smart cards (e.g. the German Signature Card V2.0) are now imported automatically. Previously, the import had to be triggered manually. (T6846)

KNotes

Fixed not translated shortcut (BKO#484281)
Fixed some not extracted i18n string (BKO#484186)

Akregator

Martín González Gómez implemented a new article theme for Akregator which is not only more readable for long-form content but also adapts correctly to dark color themes.

Akregator has received a number of bug fixes:

Fixing error when adding feed from https://www.qt.io/blog (BKO#484615)
Fixing translated shortcut (BKO#484281)
Fixing akregator icon, in systray does not follow dark breeze theme (BKO#483737)

Itinerary

Our travel assistance app Itinerary now shows more details about vehicle and train coach amenities, informs about daylight saving time changes at travel destinations and received many more fixes and improvements for extracting travel documents. See Itinerary's own bi-monthly status update for more details.

Merkuro

Merkuro now make uses of the new Date and Time picker from Kirigami Addons instead of bringing it's own. The date picker instance is also now shared in multiple places to reduce memory and CPU usage and speedup opening the even editor.

Various dialogs were also modernized.

Get Involved

Join us in the #kontact:kde.org Matrix channel or the kde-pim mailing list!