The stuff I remember to write down
Today (Wednesday 27th Oct) at 18:00 CEST I will be streaming some Kalendar development live on YouTube and on KDE’s Peertube instance.
KDE Peertube (Kockatoo): https://tube.kockatoo.org/c/clau_cambra/videos
My YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etAlv78LaIE
If you are curious about contributing to Kalendar, have questions for me, or just want to hang out, come say hi! 😁
In our last week of KDE Review, we have been focused on fixing as many bugs — big and small — as we have been able to. Thank you to everyone who has reported bugs, and thank you even more if you have helped in fixing them!
Besides bug-fixes, we also have some pretty nifty usability improvements in store that should make Kalendar more intuitive, more user-friendly, and more pleasant to use than ever!
Note: Kalendar is still under heavy development. You’re free to poke around and try it out, but it is not yet final software! If you want to contribute to its development, join us in Kalendar’s Matrix room.
We have continued fixing bugs and making improvements during this week of KDE Review. This Sunday, KDE Review will be over, and (hopefully!) we will have passed! From then on, we will be able to start using KDE’s infrastructure to create actual releases. Exciting!
More exciting is the fact that we will be sharing more details about a beta very, very soon…
But first, this week’s improvements!
!129: Make it possible to collapse the sidebar (Felipe Kinoshita)
Commit 95d6429b: Sidebar collapsed-ness now remembered by Kalendar (Claudio Cambra)
If you don’t need to access your tags and calendars very often, you might find that the sidebar is an unnecessary use of the application window’s horizontal space. Or, maybe you would like to have Kalendar in a small window and find that the sidebar is too wide to see the current calendar view.
That’s why this week we have added a new feature: the sidebar is now collapsible into a thin strip. This thin strip only shows the buttons to switch views, meaning that you can retain access to your most needed actions while taking up the least horizontal space possible.
Kalendar also makes sure to remember which state you put the sidebar in, saving you from having to collapse the sidebar every single time you open up the app.
Note that this only affects the desktop mode; on mobile, the drawer still works as usual.
!135: Make week view all day header auto-adjust height to incidences and enable manual change of this view’s height (Claudio Cambra)
The week view’s multi and all day view has seen a significant improvement in how it handles its height. Whereas before the header’s size was consistent regardless of the number of incidences it had to show, it now automatically adjusts its height to that of the lines of incidences it shows.
Additionally, you can now click on the bottom edge of the header and drag to vertically resize this header, letting you set this header’s height as you please. A handy little ‘Reset’ button appears in the bottom-left corner when you do so, letting you return it to automatic height.
!130: Remember the last collection used when adding an incidence (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 1bb8bfd3: Setting an incidence start now makes the incidence end follow it (Claudio Cambra)
Several changes have been merged this week that improve the process of creating and editing incidences.
The first is that Kalendar now remembers the last calendar to which you added an incidence. This means that when you go ahead and add a new task or event, the incidence editor will automatically be set to the last calendar you added an incidence too. This should hopefully save you from having to pick your desired calendar when creating new tasks and events. Kalendar also differentiates between task and event calendars, meaning you won’t, for example, accidentally add an event to your last used task calendar — your last used event calendar will be pre-selected.
We have also reworked the way that time selection works for incidences. Before, start and end times were selected completely independently. This often lead to warnings about end times preceding start times, even though you hadn’t even had a chance to select an end time. Now, changing the start time of an incidence will automatically move the end time too, saving you from accidental errors. It should also make it easier to change the time of an event if you, for example, selected the wrong date, since upon changing the start date the end date will be changed too. The end date and time is always changed in accordance to the prior difference between start and end time, so if you had selected an incidence to start at 4 and end at 5, if you change the start time to 2 the incidence will now end at 3.
!131: Time pickers now respond to mouse scroll, making them more intuitive to use on desktop (Claudio Cambra)
Another time-related improvement relates to the time picker, used to select times in the incidence editor. This component can now be used with the mouse scroll wheel — meaning if you preferred to use the picker rather than type into the time field, this will now be a lot quicker and easier.
!128: Add a go menu to window and global menus (Claudio Cambra)
The menu bars now have a new menu: the ‘Go’ menu. This menu contains several entries that should make date navigation more accessible.
We have put the standard ‘Backwards’ and ‘Forwards’ actions here, as you would expect, which moves the different date views forwards or backwards one screen — whether this is a month in the month and schedule views, or a week in the week view. Also included is an action which lets you go back to today.
Additionally, we have added an action that brings up the date changer popup. We realised it’s not immediately obvious that the views’ date title is a button that brings up the date changer. The new ‘To Date…’ action in the ‘Go’ menu provides a more discoverable way to bring up the date changer, making Kalendar slightly more usable.
!122: Pressing Escape now closes dialog windows, overlay sheets, and incidence info (in that order) (Claudio Cambra)
Power users always request quicker ways to do things — to do things, open things, and close things. Well, now we’re making closing things a lot quicker: the Escape key now closes dialog windows, overlay sheets, and drawers. So you can quickly dismiss an incidence, or the incidence editor, or the delete confirmation sheet.
!132: Use real window instead of OverlaySheet for tasks (Carl Schwan)
In the tasks view, opening the completed tasks on the desktop now brings up a separate window instead of an integrated overlay sheet. This should make this window more manipulable on the desktop, while retaining the sheet on mobile.
This also applies to the calendar selection dialog invoked when adding a quick task in the tasks view.
!125: Display hovered link in the bottom left (Carl Schwan)
Links are now easier to handle than they were before. When you hover above a link in the incidence information drawer — whether this is an attendee’s email address, a website in the description, or the URL for a meeting — you can now see the link’s URL in the bottom-left of the Kalendar window, just like you would in your browser.
Additionally, you can now drag-click and highlight (and then copy and paste) links too.
Commit b851709e: Fix typo in CMakeLists (Fabian Vogt)
Commit a19114fa: Fix multiple top-level definitions of enum Roles breaking ODR (Fabian Vogt)
Commit 7b48c205: Fixed touch on mobile, broken by deselectormousearea (Claudio Cambra)
Commit c5213a06: Capitalization fixes (Justin Zobel)
Commit 374f3920: Fix menu layout consistency (Justin Zobel)
Commit 60f68793: Deboldened Summary label in incidence editor (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 5d94e5c0: Weekdays fixed in date picker (Claudio Cambra)
Commit a3b95a7b: Week view incidence squares now clip and font becomes small when space restricted (Claudio Cambra)
Commit ae746ce5: Fixed touch scroll on weekview (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 56321a1d: Fixed hour label misalignment in different locales (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 5489bb9c: Fixed crashing when switching views and about page open (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 69665e7b: Fixed week view incidence delegate binding loop for property isTinyHeight (Claudio Cambra)
Commit e187993a: Fixed TodoTreeView todoItemContents width property binding loop (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 5f1b9216: Fixed alignment of labels in tasks without occurrence details in tasks view (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 17527867: Make “Month View Settings” separator consistent with other separators (Felipe Kinoshita)
Commit a23778c3: Remove unused “getCurrentView” function (Felipe Kinoshita)
Commit b36f1274: Fixed sidebar behaviour on desktop when not widescreen (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 248a22e6: Fixed super glitchy sidebar collapse behaviour on window resize (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 9d99eb41: Fixed drawer on mobile when wide (Claudio Cambra)
Is there anything you’d like to see added to Kalendar? Get in touch! I’m @clau-cambra:kde.org on Matrix.
First of all: happy birthday to KDE! If you hadn’t heard, KDE is now 25 years old (which means that KDE is 3 years older than I am — oof). I first started using KDE (3) on Mandrake after, out of the blue, my dad decided to nuke our family computer’s Windows 95 installation. I was 3 at the time, and very angry at the fact that I would no longer be able to play Monster Truck Madness. Now, here we are, almost 20 years later!
Without the efforts of the KDE community and its amazing software, Kalendar wouldn’t exist. We depend on so many different things — Kirigami, Akonadi, the KFrameworks, and more — that without two and a half decades of prior efforts from other community members, this application just wouldn’t exist. So, from myself and from everyone who has been involved in creating Kalendar — thanks!!
Back to Kalendar. Last Sunday, we submitted Kalendar for KDE Review… and we received our first review! That has meant fixing bugs, improving UI stuff, and more. Seriously — scroll to the bugfix section and check it out. As always, though, we have some new features to show off too.
Note: Kalendar is still under heavy development. You’re free to poke around and try it out, but it is not yet final software! If you want to contribute to its development, join us in Kalendar’s Matrix room.
Last Sunday, we received our first round of feedback for KDE Review (thanks Albert!) and have spent this week addressing the issues brought up there. These were mainly technical, but we also had some useful UI feedback which we have taken on board and addressed (and are included in this update post).
You can follow the KDE Review process for Kalendar on the mailing list, or keep tuning in to the weekly updates, where we will let you know how things are going.
Every week we tweak and adjust the UI to make sure it is as good as it can be. The same goes for our logo 😉
After revealing our new logo last week, we had some feedback that the large number of small squares would be difficult to distinguish as a small icon. We therefore have tweaked the logo to have just four, larger squares rather than the 6 it previously had, which should make them much easier to distinguish at the small size of an icon.
Kalendar now shows up on both apps.kde.org and plasma-mobile.org. You can find find information about our app, our repository, and more in these sites.
!117: Layout mirroring support for menubar (Carl Schwan)
Kalendar should now adapt better to languages and locales where the layouts are right-to-left thanks to some changes in how the the relevant components assign actions to action slots. This should make Kalendar’s layout more logical when using it in right-to-left mode!
!86: Make it possible to resize the right drawer (Carl Schwan)
Since we first introduced the incidence information drawer, we thought it would be nice to make it resizeable on the desktop and to let the user decide how much space it should take up. Well, we now have this feature, and it works pretty dang well!
The set size of the incidence information drawer is remembered so it will remain consistent once it is set by you, no matter which incidence you open or how many times you have closed Kalendar.
!119: Rewrite date picker and unify infinite calendar view models (Claudio Cambra)
We have completely rewritten the date picker. Why? Well, to improve it!
Our previous iteration was buggy and difficult to use on mobile, owing to the fact that you had to interact with tiny buttons up in the picker’s header. Now, the datepicker is bug-free, and you can interact with it as you would expect to interact with any of Kalendar’s other calendar views.
The month, year, and decade views are all infinitely swipeable, letting you select any date you would like by simply swiping to it and tapping it. You can also easily return to the current day by tapping the ‘Today’ button. We have made sure to retain the same design as Plasma’s Calendar widget, which should make this picker feel very familiar.
We have also submitted a merge request to include this date picker in the Kirigami Addons package, which hopefully means that it will be easily usable by other KDE app developers in the near future!
!121: Deselect incidence upon clicking on empty space (Claudio Cambra)
You can now easily deselect an incidence (and, by extension, close the incidence information drawer) on the desktop by clicking on empty space within your current calendar view. This makes Kalendar behave more as you would expect it to, and help you easily dismiss the drawer when you don’t want it to be there.
Pretty sure this is one of our longest bug-fix sections yet…
Commit 5864c59e: Fixed incidence editor not letting you save edited task when clicking edit in incidence info from tasks view (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 4fe0bd89: Full reuse compliance (Carl Schwan)
Commit 5bf9ce59: Fix sort read (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 1ccf7700: Fix sorting in tasks view and ensure that when sorting by values, null values are always at bottom (Claudio Cambra)
Commit c6bdd120: More sort fixes (Claudio Cambra)
Commit cfa95dd9: Add KLocalizedString::setApplicationDomain(kalendar) (Claudio Cambra)
Commit bf476940: Fixed kf.i18n: ‘0 instead of 1 arguments to message…’ error (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 6f3b5348: TitleDateButton now uses i18n based standaloneMonthName month-year strings (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 37536b54: Date picker no uses standaloneMonthName (Claudio Cambra)
Commit edcc6bb6: Moved regex out of AttendeeStatusModel constructor loop (Claudio Cambra)
Commit aaadf2af: Fixed property warnings (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 9602d477: Remove not needed kpackage dependency (Carl Schwan)
Commit a0672920: Fix deletion of attachments from incidence editor (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 1a198c46: Todo page now loads correctly when opening Kalendar (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 97f6f42c: Fixed some error messages (Claudio Cambra)
Commit c4433124: Fixed some more error messages (Claudio Cambra)
Commit ac6fbac2: Links in incidence info now have pointy hand cursor (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 9ebc2bc6: Make IncidenceEditor’s description text area wrap it’s text (Felipe Kinoshita)
!120: Add vendored TreeView components (Claudio Cambra)
Commit 2547d957: Remove minor build warning (Carl Schwan)
Commit 1df8a16a: Fix not being able to interact with task tree view (Carl Schwan)
Commit edfcf7a5: Fix QML warning in task view (Carl Schwan)
Commit 149b594c: Fixed leak in AttendeeStatusModel constructor (Claudio Cambra)
Is there anything you’d like to see added to Kalendar? Get in touch! I’m @clau-cambra:kde.org on Matrix.
