[Kde-pim] Proposal for a new pim application

Sun Dec 6 16:02:42 GMT 2009

On Thursday 26 November 2009 11:40:22 Stephen Kelly wrote:
> Christian Mollekopf wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > After some thinking and reading half of "Getting things done" (over which
> > i stumbled during my research), i would like to outline again the
> > features of the program i plan to write, and ask for some information.
> > If you are not interested in the program feel free to skip directly to
> > the "Implementation" part to answer my questions, or skip the mail
> > completely ;-)
> >
> > Aims:
> > -make it easy to create notes but process them later (so you don't have
> > to think ATM. where something belongs, but can do it sometime later when
> > you have time)
> 
> Did you see my recent screencast about notes on the desktop? I didn't demo
> it, but you can also create a new note on the desktop and it goes into an
> "unsorted" collection of notes which can be organized later.

yes, i had a look at it and it looks really cool. But I don't think plasmoids 
are the suitable interface for handling a lot of notes/todos.
As reminder though, or if one just uses notes from time to time,  it looks 
perfect =)

Chandler is a project with a quite nice interface, which I am using at the 
moment quite a lot. Of course it completely lacks integration with all other 
utilities, and also association are only possible with manual tags.

> 
> > -make it easy to associate notes,todos,?. with related data  (mail, files
> > on filesystem, other todos, ?..)
> >
> > So it should be a container to store random data, and an interface to
> > organize this data later on (supported by automatic association)
> 
> My hope is that we can make use of nepomuk for these kinds of relational
> features, and possibly relate notes, todos and other "things" with projects
> or tasks which would by extension relate them together in a hopefully
>  useful way.
exactly, that's what i want
> 
> I think transforming a note into a TODO would be a good feature to have, or
> even creating a new separate todo from an existing note.
absolutely, one of things i need a lot

> 
> > Functionality:
> > -a quick interface to create new notes, todos, ?.
> 
> In progress?
Not really, I'm having a look at semnotes at the moment, but in semnotes it 
seems the notes are stored directly in nepomuk, while we probably should store 
all notes in akonadi and pull in related data via nepomuk (according to what 
you mentioned).
> 
> > -automatic association of related data
> > -manual association of related data (tagging..)
> 
> This kind of functionality is what Laura Dragan (with semnotes) and others
> in Nepomuk are working on I believe. Semantic analysis of text is
>  difficult, and instead of tagging (which associates things/notes with
>  strings which have no semantic meaning) I think we should work on
>  associating notes with things which can be understood by nepmouk. For
>  example, associate a note with a "Project". A "Project" has a deadline
>  three days from now, other todos, people working on it (who I can
>  email/phone) etc.
> 
> Or associate a note of something I want to discuss with someone with the
> "Person" object that Nepomuk knows about. That would give easy access to
> emails I recently wrote to them, blogs they wrote and "this person is
> pinging me on IRC" notifications.
> 
> Associating notes with static strings which have no further meaning
>  wouldn't easily bring these features

Agreed, tagging is just the most simple and basic way to associate data.
Of course this doesn't use the full power of akonadi and nepomuk, and we 
should definitely try to use such "advanced tags", which can be understood by 
nepomuk. Nevertheless i think, manual tags are a good starting point, since it 
already allows to do a lot, and should be the most trivial to start with.

> 
> > -a user defined set of views on nepomuk queries( which represent i.e.
> > task lists), which should allow to have i.e. todo lists which are
> > automatically updated as new information is available.
> 
> This is something that should be possible with virtual collections in
> Akonadi. The idea, though not fully realized yet, is that a virtual
> collection in Akonadi would represent the result of a nepomuk query, and
> that result set can be shown in an application and interacted with. Akonadi
> then manages the linking of items which newly match the query, and
>  unlinking of items which no longer match the query.

Ok, so this would mean the main interface to the data is akonadi, which itself 
gets more data from outside (non pim data), via nepomuk. 

> 
> > This should allow to work according to the GettingThingsDone methods, but
> > does not enforce it in any way. I just like to work like this, but the
> > program should not be a dedicated GTD app.
> >
> > Key is of course that it works well together with all other PIM
> > applications, since i am not interested to reimplement any of this
> > functionality.
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> Kevin Ervin has been working on a GTD type app I think called zanshin. I'm
> not sure where it is though. Probably svn playground or some random git
> repo.
> 
> > Now i figured, that i have to start coding with my own application first
> > to fully understand what is needed, so i can also really help to create
> > code which can be used by other similar projects (or simply join the
> > efforts of other projects).
> > I still want to collaborate as much as possible with similar projects
> > (SemNotes, KJots, Basket, ?.), at least for library parts, but most of
> > these programs have different aims, at least for the UI (except maybe
> > semnotes)
> 
> Yes, I think there are still some difficult pieces left to get libraries
> which the multitude of note taking and "kind of short kind of temporary
>  kind of random text" apps we have can all use.
> 
> > Implementation:
> > -all data retrieval should go via nepomuk (while all akonadi data is fed
> > into nepomuk)
> > -new pim data (notes, todos,?) should be created directly in akonadi (and
> > find its way back to the visualization via nepomuk)
> 
> I would like to know more about data retrieval with nepomuk, but that is
>  the kind of thing that akonadi is specifically for. I guess feeding data
>  from akonadi into nepomuk would work if we had a resource to do it, but
>  right now I'm not convinced it is the way to go. That could be just my
>  ignorance shining through though. I agree that new notes/todos should be
>  created through Akonadi apis.

According to what you said above, it should go the other way round, right?

application <= akonadi <= nepomuk

> 
> > So here are my questions for you:
> > -Is the above outlined implementation the right way to go?
> > -Is the bridge between akonadi and nepomuk already working?
> 
> I believe akonadi can create nepomuk query and put the result in a virtual
> collection, but it is a while since I looked at it. I think that would be a
> good starting point for you actually. The last I heard it was putting the
> nepomuk query into the remoteId of the akonadi collection, which should
>  work for your use, but I think it should be separated into an attribute of
>  the collection.
> 
> > I will go on with the techbase tutorials which are existing on nepomuk
> > and akonadi, if you have any other resources of information I'm glad for
> > any hint.
> 
> The akonadi and nepomuk apidocs should also have useful information.
>  Akonadi developers are available on #akonadi on IRC. My nick is steveire
>  there.
> 
> You might also find this interesting if you didn't see it:
> 
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.devel.pim/26057
> 
> Another thread I should follow up on...
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Steve.

Thanks for all the info and input,

Chris

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