September/October KDE PIM summary blog post

[Carl Schwan]

On Saturday, October 23, 2021 11:18:03 PM CEST Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> Hi,

Hi,
>
> first something not for the blog post, but feel need to mention here to
> fellow PIM devs:
> Had started investigations into a range of bugs, but currently stalled there
> due to yet incomplete insight, sorry to all who quickly helped me but then
> saw no further reaction so far. I first need to get finally some of my
> feature needs implemented to enhance my energy/motivation :) But I feel
> challenged by all those bugs and should return at a later point to defeat
> them finally and put them on my virtual trophy wall ;) (not that I mind
> others sacking them before of course).
>
> Here the public things from my desk:
>
> General:
> * some porting away from deprecated Qt, KF & PIM libs API
> * some clean-up of code of PIM's deprecated API with no more users
>
> EventViews/KOrganizer:
> Started on-going work on reviving the calendar decoration feature.
> It was added in 2007 (see last section of https://commit-digest.kde.org/
> issues/2007-06-17/, respective screenshot https://commit-digest.kde.org/
> issues/2007-06-17/files/korganizer_themed_decorations.png), but in the years
> after while staying around suffered from lack of maintenance, having now
> layout issues as well as some plugins badly or not working at all.
>
> The plugin for "Picture of the day" from English Wikipedia has already been
> restored, will be in KDE Gear 21.12:
> MR (landed) -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-addons/-/merge_requests/17
> screenshot -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-addons/uploads/
> 966d16b09dab6ce1a4969ee2a6da75dd/Screenshot_20211014_210315.png
>
> A some years ago started plugin for moon phases has seen more work now and
> hopefully is landing soon in time for KDE Gear 21.12 as well:
> MR (draft) -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-addons/-/merge_requests/12
> screenshot -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-addons/uploads/
> 4ef668e4bbf5b5cb9469714d55a99358/Screenshot_20210728_154659.png
>
> The moon phase plugin then triggered on-going work to have calendar
> decoration also shown in the month view:
> MR (draft) -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/eventviews/-/merge_requests/46
> screenshot -> https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-addons/uploads/
> ff28c7df9db45a14e87680e029a61dca/Screenshot_20211021_010202.png

Thanks for the info :)

> Restoring and enhancing the calendar decoration feature might turn into a
> long term project. An developing idea for the future would be to make these
> decoration plugins generic enough to also be usable from other calendaring
> solutions, like Plasma calendar widgets or apps like Kalendar. There surely
> are lots of use-cases for all kind of context information or actions users
> might want to have shown or available on their digital calendar to match
> their respective interests & needs. Reusable plugins would help here, e.g.
> with consistency across the products and with no need for reimplementation
> for each individual product.

Calendar decoration is indeed a very nice idea. A while ago following
my rewrite of the Plasma Calendar applet a Chinese user (Gary Wang) contacted
me with an interesting feature request. He wanted to add the lunar Chinese
calendar side by side with the gregorian calendar since as far I understood
they use both in China. He already add a fork of the Plasma Calendar applet
with this feature but it is hardcoded [1].

>From some research on Internet it seems that China isn't the only country
with a western and a traditional calendar used side by side, so implementing
this feature generically would be nice. I added him as CC.

I can try next weekend to try to look in that would be needed to have the
decoration feature available in the Plasma Calendar applet and Kalendar.

Cheers,
Carl

[1]: https://github.com/BLumia/pineapple-calendar

> Cheers
> Friedrich