Plasma Mobile on the Librem 5

[Eike Hein]

On 08/30/2017 10:31 PM, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> I was made aware of that effort already a few weeks ago, and it is
> looking great! I guess the default Matrix app in the Librem phone
> would have to be something focused on person-to-person communication
> and tight integration with the user's contact list, instead of being
> more group-chat centric like Konversation is. But having more choice
> in Matrix clients is a good thing, and maybe we can have different UIs
> for the same backend.

Indeed!

Having worked on chat and related stuff for some time, we're no
stranger to trying to provide rich integration in that space.

Once upon a time in KDE 3, we had a technology called "KIMProxy" -
KMail was able to tell you when the sender of an email was online
in Konversation on IRC while you were reading their mail, as both
drew upon the same address book, with Konversation allowing to
associate IRC nicks with address book contacts and contributing
presence state to a global pool. Our instant messenger application
at the time, Kopete, was likewise integrated with the system.

In Plasma 5 we currently have a successor technology called KPeople,
which is used in concert with KDE Telepathy, the KActivities(-Stats)
framework and the launcher menu backend. The launcher menus bundled
with Plasma Desktop have an optional "Recent Contacts" category
which will list recent conversations by contact, with realtime
presence status (i.e. a little online status badge on the contact
avatar used as icon for the menu entry).

This works by KDE Telepathy providing a KPeople plugin that contri-
butes data (contact info, state) to the pool and entering KPeople
URIs to the KActivities-Stats db when opening a conversation. The
launcher menu backend queries the db, and then uses KPeople API to
get contact info and state - without knowing anything about KDE
Telepathy specifically.

The plan would be for Konversation's Matrix backend to likewise
integrate with KPeople, getting that info into the launchers.

This is relevant for Plasma Mobile as we have plans to reimple-
ment the homescreen UI on top of the Plasma Desktop launcher
menu backend - it provides all the apps/docs/contacts/widgets
data it needs along with a rich favoriting mechanism (i.e.
pinning things). The Application Dashboard fullscreen launcher
bundled with Plasma Desktop probably drives this possibility
home the best right now.

Retaining KPeople, PM's Contacts application would then likewise
be written against its APIs.

This is all stuff we have in some sense done before, know how to
do, and know we want ... :)


Cheers,
Eike
-
Plasma, apps developer
KDE e.V. vice president, treasurer