[Kde-pim] draft proposal

Sat Apr 6 14:59:28 BST 2013

Hi Heena,

On Wednesday, 2013-04-03, Heena Mahour wrote:
> Hey Kevin,
> Please give suggestion and could you please elaborate which plasmoids(apart
> from notes sharing using akonadi) are to be created for this project?
> ==========
> *GSoC'13 Project Proposal*
> 
> 
> *Name:   *         Heena Mahour
> *Email:*            heena393 at gmail.com
> *IRC nick*:        stack3457
> *Location: *       New Delhi, India.
> 
> 
> *Prposal Title:* * Plasma Workspace Integration for Akonadi*
> 
> *Motivation fr proposal:*
> 
> Plasma Workspace is very well designed to accommodate various panels,
> widgets, etc. on the desktop and has seen many changes since KDE 4.1 in the
> plasma design and architecture. Its developer friendly code-base allows
> various programmers to easily create custom plasmoids which can be
> distributed as a small bundle and be easily integrated into the plasma
> workspace.
> 
> With introduction of Qt Quick/QML in Qt 4.7, the gap between the developers
> and UI designers got narrowed down with its rich set of QML elements and
> intuitive declarative QML language. QML allows designers to create fluid
> like animated UIs very quickly. And most importantly, the animations happen
> without the slightest glitch. The Javascript/C++ bundle efficiently handles
> all the back-end implementation, leaving the designers to concentrate on
> the animations and UI simplicity.

I am not sure we need those two paragraphs, i.e. we all know that already :)

> The aim of this project is to have multiple working Plasma Workspace
> integration bits and pieces This idea is about working and completing
> several smaller items for workspace integration
> A great advantage by it  it is reduce the code maintenance effort for the
> KDE community. The plasmoids written in QML (for eg to store data in
> Akonadi) will have considerably less code as QML allows the creation of
> fluid UIs in a powerful declarative way.

One of the missing pieces is monitoring, control and management of the various 
background processes which are part of the Akonadi infrastructure.
E.g. there is currently no Plasma applet or similar UI that allows users to 
see which mail accounts are currently checked for new mail, no way to cancel 
such a check or temporarily suspend checking.

> I’ve been using Linux for quite a long time, but I just became a KDE user
> in the beginning of the last year when I participated in season of kde
> 2012.My enthusiasm towards KDE initially led me to learning Qt (which I
> grasped very quickly) and made a lot of small applications with it (like a
> kde plasmoid [1])for some experience. I have already been a fan of the KDE
> Plasma amongst other KDE features, and this project is the bull's eye
> towards my interest. I see a perfect opportunity to develop some real life
> desktop user interface with the latest technology of QtQuick through this
> project.

I like this paragraph :)

> *Implementation plan:*
> 
> Initially the steps were chosen for this project:
> 1)KDE currently has multiple notes plasmoids to store user notes. The best
> looking plasmoid is currently the one that plasma ships, but it does not
> use akonadi to store notes. It would be better to have one plasmoid which
> looks awesome and stores data in Akonadi and retiring other plasmoids.
> 2)?? (Please suggest)

IMHO, but I will have to refer this to the Plasma developers, the main goal 
should be to provide Plasma user interfaces for at least seeing the current 
state of mail account backends (Akonadi resources), ideally also UI for common 
actions.

For last year's GSOC we tried to put a couple of idea into the wiki [1]. They 
don't necessarily still apply completely, but should give you an idea.

See also [2] and [3] for a rought prototype Viranch Mehta and I worked on for 
a presentation at a KDE PIM sprint.

The other point about notes applets is definitely also worthwhile.

> *Tentative Timeline:*
> 
> May 1 onwards : Read plasma code and get familiar with the current
> plasma/plasmoids code and the plasma library.
> May 13 - May 26 : Practice painting the widets in qml . Probably write one
> or two practice plasmoids to get a first hand feel of how they're made.
> May 26 - June 9: Start with the actual re-factoring of the plasmoids into
> QML/C++ or QML/Javascript (whichever is most suitable). I plan to invest
> one-two weeks with the first two-three plasmoids .
> June 10 -June 30 :Remaining widgets  may be covered within this week each.
> July 1- July 7: Testing each plasmoid  and when it undergoes the
> re-factoring.
> July 8 -July 14 :Do the final adjustment ,fix bugs .
> July 15 onwards : work on documentation

Any input on timeline from the Plasma developers?

> *About Me:*
> 
> I'm a second year engineering student, pursuing B.Tech. in Computer
> engineering(COE) from Delhi Technological University(Formerly Delhi College
> of Engineering),New Delhi,India.
> 
> I’ve been using Linux for quite a long time, but I just became a KDE user
> in the beginning of the last year when I participated in season of kde
> 2012[3].In*Season of KDE 2012*, I worked on Kde-edu game 'pairs' where I
> have done the following  :-
> 
> > Developed layout for the editor of the game pairs.
> > Developed themes for the game –pairs
> > Learned the basics of the project building & concept of make files .
> 
>  Mentor:*Marco Calignano.*
>  Status : Complete and my themes are also available as add-on at
>  kde-look.org <http://kde-files.org/index.php?xcontentmode=647>.
> KDE is the project I've been most familiar to and interested in, as I see
> most of cutting edge technologies wrapped up in KDE, and of course, I love
> the awesome community commitment and dedication towards the same.
> 
> I've been following few mailing lists and the development in trunk since
> half an year. I have contributed to kde by providing pastebin
> scripts,various themes for kde-game -pairs and a plasmoid shuffle [4][1] to
> get a hold of KDE code-base and the development process of KDE.
> 
> Besides,I have also tried to implement a tic tace toe game using qml [5]
> and a text editor [6].Apart from these,I love blogging and I have blogged
> about my projects at blogspot [7]

Quite impressive for someone so new to the project :)

Cheers,
Kevin

[1] http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi#Workspace_integration
[2] git at git.kde.org:scratch/krake/akonadiagents-dataengine.git
[3] git at git.kde.org:scratch/viranch/akonadiagents-applet.git

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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