March/April KDE PIM summary blog post

Mon May 2 17:01:56 BST 2022

Here's the current draft for review:

Since the [last report](https://blog.sandroknauss.de/kde-pim-Januar-februar-2022/) two month ago a lot has happened around KDE's personal 
information management applications again. More than 1300 changes by more than 
25 people resulted in many improvements as well as the 22.04 feature release.
Here are some of the highlights.

### Kontact

* All Kontact applications can now dynamically change the color scheme at 
runtime and have a fullscreen mode now.
* Searching in many places is aware of diacritics and accents now, and can 
ignore those. This means e.g. searching for "resume" also finds “résumé” and 
vice versa, which can be particularly useful in international communication 
where those details can get lost due to not everyone even having the the input 
methods to type things correctly.

Ongoing since quite some time is the continuous effort to prepare the code 
base for the transition to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6. There also has been work 
on improving the CI coverage by introducing pre-integration checks for Windows
as well where possible, and by introducing stricter CI checks for unit tests.

### Calendaring

* Kalendar and KOrganizer now finally use the same unified reminder daemon, 
replacing the previous app-specific implementations.
* Damien Caliste added support for the iCal notebook feature. This enables for 
instance to get a list of important incidences.
* Alois Spitzbart made KHolidays read all categories from a holiday definition 
and fixed cases where the same holidays would be shown several times (bug 
441275).

#### Kalendar

* Several UI tweaks and fixes have been made to make certain interactive 
elements clear, such as resizeable drawers and headers, which now become 
highlighted on hover/click.
* Hovering over tasks now highlights said tasks in the color of their parent 
calendar.
* The week view/three day view/day view has seen changes to its layout code 
that should improve the positioning and sizing of events and tasks that take 
place in shorter timespans and that overlap with each other.
* There is an ongoing effort to refactor and move around commonly used
calendaring code with the goal to reduce Kalendar's dependencies, and in
particular any remaining widget-based UI code paths that aren't well suited
for mobile use.

#### KOrganizer

* The “floating” time zone is supported properly.  A floating event occurs
at a certain time of day, regardless of your computer's time zone
setting.  If you create a floating event named “Second Breakfast”
starting at 9:30, travel to Minas Tirith, and change your system's time
zone to “Gondor”, “Second Breakfast” will still appear at 9:30 on your
calendar.
* Some buggy programs create ICS files containing events that do not have
Unique IDs.  KOrganizer can now import such files (bug 339726).
* If KOrganizer can't import a file containing the ancient vCalendar
format, the error messages that it produce are more informative (bug
328976).
* In the Incidence Editor, `Tab` and `Shift-Tab` move directly from the
Calendar menu to the Summary field and back (bug 331543).
* When the Incidence Editor edits an instance that was created from a
template, it no longer resets the start, end, or due dates (bug 332048).
* Pressing the “Today” button causes the Month view to show today's
month;  previously, it would sometimes show the previous month (bug
333066).
* The user's preferences for “icons to use” in the Agenda and Month
views are preserved when KOrganizer restarts (bug 449473).
* Progress indicators in the todo tree view are no longer sometimes
wrongly rendered vertically.

### Kleopatra

TODO

### KMail

* Fix KMail not displaying calendar invites properly (bug 452480, will be
part of 22.04.1).
* Correctly check if an SMTP server supports Delivery Status Notifications 
(DSN) before using that.
* Fix travel information extraction for certain combinations of email and text
codecs used in Asia.

### KAlarm

* Move all Akonadi dependencies into a plugin, to enable KAlarm to be run by
users who don't use Akonadi.
* Make KAuth an optional dependency.
* Move kalarmcal library from its own repository into kalarm.
* Remove all 'speak' functions if text-to-speech not available at build time.
* When default resources are created on first run, ensure they are enabled.
* Fixed some UI bugs in the Preferences dialog.
* Display a resource's alarms if it is disabled and re-enabled.

### Itinerary

There has been quite some activity around [KDE Itinerary](https://
apps.kde.org/itinerary)
as well, as you'll find in its dedicated [summary blog post]({{ site.baseurl 
}}{% link _posts/2022-04-02-kde-itinerary-february-march-2022.md %}).

In very recent news, we are unfortunately no longer able to publish updates in
the Google Play store, due to KDE Itinerary being able to store health
certificates. New rules by Google do not allow such a feature unless you are a
government or public health entity.

The only way around that would be building
a separate version just for the Play store with that feature as well as any
references to it in the application metadata removed. That's something our
build and deployment pipeline doesn't support at this point though.

KDE Itinerary in the Play store will be therefore be stuck at 21.12.3 for the
foreseeable future, for continuing to receive updates we recommend
[KDE's F-Droid repositories](https://community.kde.org/Android/FDroid) 
instead.

### Contacts

* Kevin Kofler make sure, that it is possible to set the birthday again via 
QML (bug 446665).

### Help us make Kontact even better!

Take a look at some of the junior jobs that we have! They are simple, mostly 
programming tasks that don’t require any deep knowledge or understanding of 
Kontact, so anyone can work on them. Feel free to pick any task from the list 
and reach out to us by [email](https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim),
[Matrix #kontact:kde.org](https://community.kde.org/Matrix) or IRC 
#kontact:libera.chat! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your 
questions. [Read more here…](https://www.dvratil.cz/2018/08/kde-pim-junior-jobs-are-opened)

On Sonntag, 1. Mai 2022 18:47:45 CEST Volker Krause wrote:
> That's quite some material already, I'll try to assemble that into a post
> tomorrow.
> 
> I'd still have two wishes though:
> - Ingo, any chance we can get a summary of the Kleopatra work? Quite a few
> things happened there again.
> - Does anyone have some vaguely related screenshots? So far this is just a
> big wall of text.
> 
> Thank you!
> Volker
> 
> On Monday, 25 April 2022 17:02:43 CEST Volker Krause wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> > 
> > it's time for the bi-monthly blog post again :)
> > 
> > If you have contributed in March or April, a summary of your most
> > noteworthy changes would be helpful, bonus points for corresponding
> > screenshots or links to already existing blog posts. If you noticed
> > something noteworthy during the past two months, feel free to add that as
> > well of course!
> > 
> > To help refresh your memories and to make sure we aren't missing anything
> > important, there's two files attached here, an auto-generated detailed
> > changelog (this tends to be 30-50% of the commits, using David F's
> > changelog scripts for KF5 releases), and basic commit stats for the PIM
> > repositories.
> > 
> > Secondly, we need help with compiling, editing and eventually publishing
> > the blog post. Ideally this rotates between a number of people so that
> > everyone has to do that only once per year or so.
> > 
> > Sandro did the last one
> > (https://blog.sandroknauss.de/kde-pim-Januar-februar-2022/), who wants to
> > do this one?
> > 
> > Thanks for you help!
> > Volker

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