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

[Vic Fryzel]

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.
>
> But this could mean a lot of work to kontact but there is also still a lot
> of work to do on the pim applications.
>
> It would be cool to create kontact like a pim application like outlook but
> instead of rewriting it to reuse widgets and code from the pim apps, but
> this means perhaps also redesign of the pim apps.
>
> These were just some thougts. As I startet to write this mail, I thought
> they were more ordered.

I totally agree.  Tight integration between the apps is an absolute necessity 
for groupware and/or a better user experience.  Right now, outside of 
contacts, the integration seems to be pretty minimal.

The first, obvious example that comes to mind is meeting requests, which come 
in via email, but affect the calendar portion of the application.  To what 
extent this is already implemented, I'm unsure.

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.

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.

-- 
Vic Fryzel (vic at shellsage dot com)
http://shellsage.com/
Key id C7B780CA = 3235 2261 807B 451C DA4D  DFBA CAA7 80CF C7B7 80CA
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