KDE PIM in July and August

KDE PIM is the set of applications that helps you manage your email, contacts, appointments, tasks and more.

Since our last report covering KDE PIM in May and June, the PIM applications and libraries have seen over 1200 changes from almost 30 contributors. Let’s go over some of the biggest updates.

New features

Kalendar

I have been working on improvements to the calendar side of Kalendar. New changes include the addition of new and improved differentiation between all-day and not all-day events in the month view. This change makes the month view look quite different — in a good way!

Another new addition is the inclusion of a new incidence information popup in some of the calendar views. In views where horizontal space is at a premium, such as the month view or the week view, the popup lets us present the same amount of information without squishing the contents of the calendar view.

Of course, this change is optional, and can be toggled in the settings if you choose to do so.

Carl has worked hard on polishing Kalendar’s new address book feature. New additions include a context menu for contacts in the contact list containing commonly-used actions, as well as more contact management features that should better help you manage the people in your life.

We have both also worked hard on improving the overall stability of Kalendar. Lots of bugs and crashes have been fixed in the application and the common reminder daemon used by Kalendar and KOrganizer. Specifics can be found below in the bug fixes section.

During the Promo sprint in Saumur (France), Carl and I met and discussed Kalendar at length. We have big, ongoing plans for the future, which we will be discussing further at Akademy 2022!

KDE Itinerary

Volker has focused on improving Itinerary’s calendar integration. New features include supporting import and export with Akonadi calendars, and recognizing more travel-related calendar content automatically. These new features should make planning your next trip much easier.

For details see Volker’s dedicated summary post.

Calendar import page recognizing transport elements and allowing individual selection.

Kleopatra

Usability and accessibility was a main focus of development for Kleopatra in the last two months. Specifically:

Moreover, some new features were added:

KMail

Laurent has merged improvements to KMail’s translator support, which now uses a new translation engine. This should make translations of emails in unfamiliar languages more accurate than ever.

Another new addition is the inclusion of an embedded mail delivery notification widget in the email viewer, which should make interacting with this feature feel better integrated and easier to deal with.

You can now interact with mail delivery notification-related actions directly from the email viewer

Lastly, KMail now has a new plugin allowing you to manage the Akonadi database within KMail.

KOrganizer

Glen has worked on KOrganizer’s drag-and drop capabilities. The month view now lets users drag events, todos, and more out of KOrganizer. These items can then be dropped into other places, such as KMail’s email composer window, where they can be used to send event information.

This feature is now available in KOrganizer’s Month, Agenda, and Todo views.

Bug fixes and compatibility improvements

Each of the PIM apps have also had many bug fixes that should make them more stable and usable. Additionally, we have also been hard at working preparing for Qt6 and making changes to ensure compatibility.

KAlarm

Kalendar

Kalendar/KOrganizer reminder service

Kleopatra

KMail

Fix Bug 456578 recipient auto-completion does not work in master git snapshots
Fix bug 448674: Spam false-positive, because link’s href & text capitalization 
mismatch
Fix 395711: External images not loaded by default if message was opened in a 
separate window

Kontact

Fix bug 457241: When the user uses the `New To-do…` menu item, the to-do is created in the system time zone instead of the “floating” time zone ().

Help us make Kontact even better!

Check out some of our open junior jobs! They are simple, mostly programming-focused tasks, but they 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, then get in touch with us! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your questions. Read more here…

10 thoughts on “KDE PIM in July and August”

  1. Those old PIM apps are nightmare, some of its years old bugs will never be fixed, it would be the best if Kalendar could add task, mail, alarm features and break away from Akonadi by using its own standalone background services. Akonadi will always break after certain time no matter how much you reset it.

    1. There is already a Clock app for Plasma Mobile, there’s no need for Kalendar to implement its own alarm feature.
      I really don’t know much about Akonadi, but surely improving its flaws is better than building it from the ground up again, right?
      I’d also prefer if the email and contacts parts of Kalendar got their own applications, instead of them being part of an app called Kalendar. It’s like Kalendar is becoming the new Kontact, but the name doesn’t really work as well because it’s really similar to the word calendar.

  2. Kmail needs a substitute like Kalendar is substituing more and more Korganizer installations. Also Kjots, which frozen in time 20 years ago (what damn notes app does not support markdown nor cloud sync in almost 2023?)
    I love Kalendar more every release, that should be the way to go for KDEPIM apps, instead keeping patching an absolete design and a constant bad functioning (did anyone ever managed to make mail text search function well? Did anyone ever managed to make mail auto-tagging system function well? What about the vertical black brand to switch plan/HTML view? Intermittently using Kmail since 2006 and it never has worked reliably, never. And those and many more bugs have been reported once and again, but no way, Kmail keeps failing, Akonadi doesn0t seem to serve for nothing useful to the user, and Kaddressbook and Korganizer keep hiding cloud address books (at least Nextcloud ones) when it wants to, one day you have it there, and the day after it’s been disabled gods know why.
    So many of us still keep Thunderbird with the due add-ons as our serious and reliable mail, organizer and contacts app, altough still use KDEPIM for non important email accounts and calendars, with the hope (vain, lustrum after lustrum) to see on day a really modern, light, fast and especially **reliably working** PIM suite; nothing stellar, just as reliable as our mobiles’ PIM apps.

    And then Kalendar came, many of us tried it with not much hope, but fortunately, even considering its scarce maturity, we had a new sentiment of hope that PIM unde KDE could be on par to other OSs.

    So, congrats and infinite thanks to Kalendar developers, and for the KDEPIM ones, please, go to the thinking corner for a while and meditate about how to approach the “Kalendar way” for a new mail client, light, fast, efficacious and solid; a new note taking app suitable for the 2nd decade of this XXIth century; a news reader at least comparable to Flipboard or at least to FeedReader or Winds, and a contact manager that wont disable data sources every now and then.
    Since all these bugs are reported since 10+ years ago and it’s notorious nobody has the minor intention to fix them, I sincerely think that devs should forget about the old mastodontic pieces of software of the KDEPIM suite and start new projects that really work and get better each day like Kalendar.

    Best.

    1. Well put Daniel, I agree with everything. I too have persevered with KDE-PIM only to be constantly disappointed. What’s particularly frustrating is not that long ago I did have a working, mobile integrated setup with it (everything except for notes), ironically by using a Google account, but this now no longer works due to the Google contacts API change. I realise this was outside the control of the devs but the subsequent, seeming lack of action or interest in migrating to the new API is perplexing to say the least. There could actually be a lot of work being done on this but without that being communicated there’s no way of knowing. From what I see, most of the development being done seems to focus on UX tweaks, bug fixes and cosmetics, all worthy things for sure but essentially useless if you can’t connect your account. It’s the equivalent of polishing the windscreen and changing the oil on a car with no wheels.
      I even set up Nextcloud in the hope that would be the solution but like you, I found it inconsistent at best and all the effort was in vain. As for using EWS with a Microsoft account, while email works fine, I’ve never been able to access either of the contacts, calendar or tasks for an integrated setup. At least Thunderbird ‘works’ in this regard but it’s such a clunky application to use though that between it and KDE-PIM, it’s quickly reaching the point where Gnome, and by extension Evolution, are looking increasingly attractive.

  3. I am following the development on gitlab as close as possible and I am really impressed by the work you are doing. Specially interested when we can make use of the email view which we can already see on your first screenshot 🙂

    Maybe you guys should rename the app, because it is no longer all about calendar 😉
    There are only three things that I would like to be implemented or changed.
    a) Personally I do not like the left bar especially the harsh line between the views and the chosen calendars. It just does not look good to me and I am wondering if it is necessary to have the calendars option be presented so prominently.
    b) Now with more and more views added to the application calendar/contacts/email I personally would love some kind of control to switch between these three main topics on the bottom left side like it is in outlook for example.
    c) One big big point that I would absolutely love to have would be an integration into online accounts kcm. I think this is one point where GNOME has a much better position than the KDE community. It is so easy and convenient to go there and just manage your accounts. I have no hard feelings about using akonadi or not in the backend besides google it works just for me. But managing these settings in Kontact is just painful and complicated. Three years ago within a BoF there was a kind of prototype (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvnz6yKbjWw) but it never happened to be finished, unfortunately.

    Just my opinion. Keep up your great work you are really doing an amazing job and I truly believe that Kalendar is today one of the best (and best looking) KDE applications out there.

  4. Hi,
    Sorry to polute this Kalendar comments thread (I just discover the app), but I want to say some words for Kontact and its apps after reading some of the comments here. I’m a user of kdepim apps since they appeared (I’m KDE user since it was first announced). I had some difficult time with bugs on various versions but I keep all my thousands of mails history in it and I’m very happy with its current MS Exchange support. Also KOrganizer works very well. I want to thank all the authors and contributors, wishing there is more of them instead of rants. I’m always sad when I see new apps appear instead of efforts to improve existing ones. But it is how Free Software works…
    Anyway, Kalendar seems to be great. Keep up the good work!

  5. Can someone comment on how far the fix for the google integration has come? It’s still not working on my computer, but I’m not ready to give up on kontact yet… 😉

  6. Great app. I’m also one of those disappointed kdepim users after almost a decade using it because it’s the “canonic” way to manage mails, addresses, tasks, etc, in Plasma but it has never worked reliably for me, not in Opensuse, Fedora, Kubuntu, Manjaro nor Arch. It’s obviously not a distro problem but upstream bugs, some of them I’ve reported and others I haven’t because other people had done it before, a couple of them were solved, most, and most important, didn’t. I don’t know if, as read several times, the problem is that KDEPIM has become too big to “repair” with its always lacking manpower team, that nonetheless do all what they can and we all must be grateful to because their generous dedication, can’t afford all the work that would be necessary.
    In any case, those guys deserve our all respect and gratitude.

    Ok, enough ranting. I just wanted to encourage the developers of Kalendar to keep on their great work, as someone has posted before, Kalendar brings new hope for the KDE environment in regards to PIM, and make a request: please write a desktop widget for tasks, a sort of To-Do list applet, like we have in most tasks and calendar apps for Android.

  7. Please write a widget for the desktop. Every task/calendar app in Android has a widget. Is very rare that in PLasma something like a dayly/weekly/whatever tasks manager not has its wiget to place on the desktop so we not miss what we have t do. I can undestand that for mail and contacts a widget no is so important, but for tasks to do I believe is fundamental.

    Regards

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