May and June in KDE PIM

Here's our bi-monthly update from KDE's personal information management applications team. This report covers progress made in the months of May and June 2024.

Since the last report 38 people have contributed over 1500 changes to KDE PIM code base.

PIM Sprint

Let's start with the biggest event of the last two months: the PIM sprint!

The team met in Toulouse for a weekend of discussions, hacking and French pastries. You can read reports from Kevin, Carl, Dan and Volker on their blogs to get all the nitty gritty.

In this report, we will cover the biggest topics that were discussed and worked on during the sprint.

Milestones

We have decided to plan and track our work in milestones. Milestones should represent a concrete goal with clear definitions of what we understand as done, and be achievable within a reasonable time frame. Each milestone is then split into smaller bite-sized tasks that can be worked on independently.

This will help us prioritize important work, make our progress more visible and, most importantly, make it easier for people to get excited about what we are working on. New contributors will also be able to pick up a well-defined task and start contributing to PIM.

You can see the milestones on our Gitlab board - if anything there catches your eye and you would like to help, reach out to us on the #kontact:kde.org Matrix channel!

This report, as well as future ones will try to focus on the current milestones and their progress, hopefully making them more exciting to read :)

Retiring KJots and KNotes

We have decided to retire the KJots and KNotes applications. These applications have not seen any support or development in many years and are not in a state that we feel comfortable shipping to our users. With the introduction of Marknote, KDE can now offer a modern, well-maintained note-taking application that we can recommend users to migrate to. The latest release of Marknote has gained support for importing notes from KJots and KNotes, so no notes will be lost.

Polished Tag Support

Tags were introduced into KDE PIM many, many years ago, but they have never reached their full potential. We have decided to change that and make tags a first-class citizen in our applications. The first step is making sure that tags are actually usable, so we started by implementing automatic extraction of tags from events and todos and syncing them into local iCal calendars and remote DAV calendars. Thanks to this, you can now sync tags between KOrganizer and NextCloud, for example.

Moving Protocol Implementations to KDE Framworks

We have libraries in KDE PIM that implement various standards and protocols. By moving them to KDE Frameworks we make them independent from KDE PIM and thus available to anyone who wants to use them. In the past we have moved KCalendarCore (iCal support library) and KContacts (vCard support library) to Frameworks. We are now working on moving KMime (email/RFC822 support library) and KIMAP (IMAP protocol implementations) to Frameworks as well.

This is helping cleanup KMime. KMime APIs is now in many places const correct to avoid the risk of modifying a message when reading it, proper CamelCase headers are now generated like for all the KDE Frameworks. Finally, parsing a MIME file is now up to 10 times faster on typical emails.

Other Improvements and Fixes

Itinerary

Our travel assistant app Itinerary gained support for the public transport routing service Transitous, got a new import staging area and can now create new entries directly from OSM elements. For more details see its own summary blog post.

Merkuro

"Snow flurry" fixed the start of the week math for locales that use Sunday as the first day of the week. They also fixed the navigation of the basic mode for the month view and week view (which are used on mobile).

Claudio continued working on the Merkuro Mail application and added a progress bar in the sidebar which appears when a background job is running.

The settings dialogs have been ported to the new KirigamiAddons.ConfigurationView which fixes some issues on mobile.

Get Involved

If you would like to get involved in KDE PIM, check our milestones board and pick a task! And don't forget to join us in the #kontact:kde.org Matrix channel or the kde-pim mailing list!