Simplifying Korganizer

[Daniel Vrátil]

On Sunday, 3 September 2017 23:35:12 CEST Olivier Churlaud wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I would like to do a very bold proposition.
> 
> To give some context, Korganizer is the KDE application I use the most after
> KMail. And even though, I have trouble to switch between the views that are
> quite mixed :
> 
>  - Agenda
>  - Month
>  - Timeline
>  - Tasks
>  - Journal
> 
> Korganizer's strenght is in the event management : so I imagine a calendar,
> with 3 views:
>  - all the events in a list,
>  - an agenda (with a focus on a month or a week or a day)
>  - timelines (without focus, just endless lines that loads when shown, or
> based on the 3 agenda focus).
> 
> First comment here : Month shall be a subset of agenda, which is currently
> not the case, and I find it always strange.

Agenda has some very special features that make no sense in month view - for 
example you can display the day's/week's agenda for each calendar next to each 
other, rather than mixed into a single view. This makes no sense in month 
view. So code-wise the separation makes sense. UI-wise, there can be 
improvements, e.g. just by having "Day", "Week", "Month" buttons in the 
toolbar.

> Tasks: Now that Zanshin is mature, why do we need to have tasks in
> Korganizer? Zanshin beeing well integrated in Kontact, I would remove that
> from korganizer, making it easier to use.

Zanshin can be a good alternative to Tasks, but it lacks lots of the 
funcionality and richness that KOrganizer has for tasks, as Zanshin is 
designed with certain workflow in mind. I'm fairly sure many people, especially 
in enterprise, would not like that.

It would also requires Zanshin to become a KDE Applications (it's in 
Extragear) and start having regular releases, which is up to Kévin.

> 
> And what is Journal? I have no answer for this, but I think that a
> specialized application integrated in Korganizer would anyway be better.

Journal is like your diary - you can create journal logs for specific dates. 
Useful for meeting logs.

Why do you think that a dedicated application would be better? UX/UI wise I'm 
pretty sure this could be fixed on KOrganizer level - like not showing event-
only calendars in Journal etc.) Code-wise it would not help at all, since you 
would be recreating lots of the code that KOrganizer already has and shares 
between events, tasks and journals....we want less code to maintain, not more 
;)

> 
> This would drastically simplify the toolbar menu, and the Korganizer code.
> In term of UX, currently it's hard to know in which view and which content
> we are : events ? journal ? tasks ? are they the same content ? well if
> not, being in the same window with the exact same menus is very strange for
> users....

On one hand, that's the beauty of it: a uniform UI for everything. I would 
hate it if I would have to toggle visible tasks differently than visible 
events just because they would be different applications...

> 
> 
> What do you think ? If you think it is relevant and a good idea, I'm ok to
> do a patch in this direction. But since it would be quite a destructive
> patch, I think we must talk about this. And I'm open to discussion and
> argumentation, if it is possible.

I would prefer a constructive patch instead :-) Identify the actual issues and 
create solutions for them (e.g. "Remove 'Agenda' from toolbar", "Make 'Day' 
and 'Week' actions enabled even if 'Month' is selected", etc.). I'm sure many 
of those issues can be fixed just by having a different KXmlUI rc file for 
standalone KOrganizer and for KParts....


Dan

> 
> Cheers,
> Olivier


-- 
Daniel Vrátil
www.dvratil.cz | dvratil at kde.org
IRC: dvratil on Freenode (#kde, #kontact, #akonadi, #fedora-kde)

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