[Kde-pim] The Future of Kontact (Was: kpinterfaces)

[Will Stephenson]

On Saturday 04 August 2007, Vic Fryzel said:
> On Saturday 04 August 2007 11:36:02 am Mathias Soeken wrote:
> > I think we should reconsider kontact. It is nice to have all the pim
> > applications consolidated, but now it is (just) a side bar with all the
> > kparts. IMHO to make it really cool, there has to be a better
> > organization between the different apps, for example a view where I can
> > see my inbox, my contacts and my tasks, but not just readable like the
> > summary now instead the real widgets to work with them.

I've dreamt of a view like this too.  It should allow the user to monitor 
things which change over time but are of interest to the user - eg watched 
mail threads, sent mails awaiting a response, upcoming appointments and 
tasks, significant rss feeds, and some kind of contact event list showing 
recent changes to important contacts (eg "SignificantOther came 
online", "BestMate twittered 'going to the cinema'", "Auntie posted new 
photos to Flickr") 

> One of the best benefits, I think, is that groupware service integration
> could be significantly easier to write, as it'd be one common interface for
> the entire suite, instead of having to add functionality to each individual
> application.
>
> I think there are numerous way to improve Kontact if it was a combined
> suite, more like evolution, but with significantly more stable integration.

This needs doing anyway, the integration between config modules needs to be 
cleaned up to make language more consistent and provide config modules that 
allow setup of multiple components from one place (like the groupwarewizard 
does, integrate that in kontact and extend for non-groupware users).
 
> Would this be an end-of-life for a bunch of the individual Kontact apps,
> though?  For it not to be, the widgets would have to be highly portable.
> There'd have to be a common library to which each application's widgets
> could interface with the parent application, I guess so that the rewritten
> Kontact would be a controller, mitigating stimuli from each widget.

AFAIK it is the intention to reimplement the PIM apps as constructs of shared 
widgets that all talk to akonadi.  Bruno Virlet has been working on these 
models for his SoC.  Whether we take these one step further and implement 
Kontact as a composite of these lower-level components rather than KParts has 
not been discussed.

Will

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