[Kde-pim] Korganizer: The Next Generation

[Janne Ojaniemi]

> That the calendar only uses 25% of the window is mainly due to the very
> small
> size of the window. Kontact is meant to be used as full-screen application.
> That's what it's designed for.


IIRC, I tested it on my own machine as well at full-screen a while back, and
while the calendar was a bit bigger, it was still in the minority, as far as
screen real-estate was concerned.


> I don't really see what's so different on your mockup. KOrganizer can
> already
> be configured to look similar to this.


I'm, not going to claim that my mockup is a radical new approach to
calendaring, since it isn't ;). And Korganizer could probably me configured
to look more or less like that. But it doesn't look like that by default. By
default, it looks "complicated".



> It's somehow a matter of taste and
> also a matter of which users you want to target. But along the traditional
> lines of calendaring KOrganizer can accommodate quite some needs.


Korganizer is quite likely very flexible and powerful calendar. But it's
also quite confusing and.... "unsmooth" by default. I would guess that if a
normal user (not a poweruser) wanted to use a calendar in KDE, he would be
turned off by the UI.

I do have a real-life example of this: my wife. She currently uses calendar
in OS X (iCal). But in the years before she started using a Mac, she never
used the calendar in KDE. And the reason or that is that iCal looks like an
app that is easy to approach, whereas Korganizer looked like Mount Everest
rising before her.

When I was creating the mockups, I asked for her opinions regarding
Korganizer. Her reply was "it looks like it's from the eighties".

I guess that she might have started using it, had I actively coached her,
and tweaked the UI. But the user should not be required to do that. With
iCal, the only thing I did was to show her where she can find the calendar,
and she went from there.


> What I would love to see is some ideas about a truly different interface,
> projecting the calendar on a three-dimensional donut, managing a calendat
> by
> intelligent parsing of free-text, using the "Akonadi clock"
> (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3647), whatever.


I think that is a very interesting idea (why hasn't it been implemented yet
;)?), but I feel that the default-view should be familiar to the user. The
"clock"-view and the like could be one of the alternative views.

The Akonadi-clock would be a very interesting plasmoid. Maybe it could be
combined with the current plasma-clock we have?


> KOrganizer has gone through many iterations and the user interface reflects
> more than ten years of development and refinement along the classical
> paper-inspired interface. I think to really improve the calendar user
> interface we have to think outside the box and try completely new ideas.


New, radical ideas would be interesting :). But I think that the calendar
should by default look "familiar".
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