It is quite normal, in Free Software initiatives, for people to come in, help out, become proficient, maybe even moderately famous, then eventually move on or drop out. Often life gets in the way, parenting, post entry level jobs and growing responsibilities reduce the available time something fierce and once one is no longer really familiar with the code base, it becomes hard to make an effective contribution in those short time and motivation windows that open up. Somewhat ironically, since a large part of my job revolves around KDEPIM, this is very true for me as well. Over the last two years or so, apart from lunch discussions over architectural issues with my colleagues, I've been able to do little more than ensure things build and work on OSX, my current main platform. Much to my delight, this has recently changed. After many years, our efforts to build and transition to the Akonadi platform are coming together lately. Although we've decided to delay by a month, relative to the normal KDE 4.5 release schedule, with KDEPIM, we are nearing production quality of all of the components of Kontact now. KDEPIM from 4.5 branch is fully based on Akonadi and usable for my normal business and personal email, calendaring (Kolab, of course) and contacts management. In this current phase, there are a myriad smaller things to notice, analyze and fix (or give someone else enough information with which to fix). Many rough edges need to be filed away and regressions in the functionality and usability identified. Especially for the later it's really useful to have been working with Kontact for many years and to know the history behind why certain things work the way they do or whether those reasons still make sense. I find this to be very satisfying work, as it allows me to throw in my experience and my odd hour of hacking time and make a meaningful difference. This got me thinking that it would be awesome if we could re-activate some of the other old KDE hands to help make our next generation PIM infrastructure and apps all that they can be. So this is a call to arms for the KDE veterans, whether they've worked on PIM in the past or not. You all know KMail and friends very well, you know deep down you really wanna be coding again, at least a bit, and you all want KDEPIM to rock the world again. The platform and tools are excellent to work with, these days, and the code base is pretty clean and modular. The community is large and friendly, it's an enthusiastic and highly motivated group that is a joy to be around. So saddle up, you weary warriors, and ride with us once again .

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We are collectively elated, in the KDEPIM community, by the news that all four of "our" applications for Google's Summer of Code have been accepted this year. There'll be work on bringing the wonders of plasma to Kontact's summary widget, improving Akonadi's SyncML support (mentored by last year's student in that area, awesomely), porting KMail to use Stephen Kelly's very cool Grantlee templating library (which will allow much easier themeing and probably attract 1000 elephants) and on infrastructure for import and export of data and settings. All this is exceedingly useful and much needed stuff, and exactly the kind of work by new contributors that we were hoping to facilitate by building a strong, flexible, nice to work with foundation in the form of Akonadi. As the core Akonadi team continues to improve the machinery under the hood and as mobile versions of our applications emerge (watch this space for news on that hopefully later today), new contributors and those who have been waiting for a while for their moment can get to work improving the overall experience and bringing KDEPIM and Kontact to its full potential. The summer of code projects are part of that, but by no means the only such efforts. It promises to be a very exciting summer. I'm personally especially happy to see several applicants succeed (in KDE overall) who failed last time. Some even failed twice but continued to learn, improve their proposals, get involved in other ways the community and have now reached a personal goal in getting accepted. I applaud their perseverance and spirit, that's what makes our communities great, I think. Speaking of perseverance, it warms my heart to see no less than 11 successful applications from India, this year, much more than ever before. Maybe we in the Free Software world are finally starting to bridge the digital divide and truly engage contributors from more diverse backgrounds.

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It is raining massively, outside, again. It does that every day here, in Manaus, what with it being the rainy season and this being the Amazon jungle. The negativity ends there, though, since it takes about 15 minutes, is very refreshing, and everything else here is Awesome (TM). I have really enjoyed the past few days, Bossa Conference has been a great experience. The presentations were generally of high quality, I had many very good conversations over many excellent meals, and by a luxurious pool, met several impressively talented individuals and the equally impressive INdT teams. There is a lot of very nice work being done here in Brazil in Free Software in general and around Qt and KDE in particular. I'm proud to have been invited to come.

The main reason for my being here is to present the current state of our efforts to bring Akonadi to mobile devices, solicit the feedback of the mobile experts here and hopefully convince some of them to help us out with their experience. The presentation was quite well received, I think, judging from the amount of interest afterwards and the very curious and in-depth questions. Let's hope our groove will soon be spiced up with some bossa and samba. My next stop on this trip is Recife, in the south of Brazil, to spread the Akonadi gospel there.

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Looks like Microsoft has released the PST format specification.

I don't normally like to link to MSDN, but I'll do it this once:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff385210.aspx

As usual with these documents, I recommend reading the PDF version rather than the HTML. Also, Firefox seems to handle MSDN a bit better than my (KDE 4.3.5) Konqueror.

If you were a mad-keen PIM hacker, and looking for a GSoC project, might be worth a look.

[Thanks to Tom Devey for the heads-up on this]

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One of the great things about KDE 4 is how powerful the APIs for the central components are. In particular, Akonadi and Nepomuk have become very easy to use in custom software and third party applications. I recently discovered another very powerful set of libraries: the plugin API for Koffice. Using those libraries, I recently wrote a little "docker" that lets you attach the documents you are currently working on in koffice to a new calendar event which can be used by any Akonadi-enabled application. For instance, you could publish minutes of a meeting to korganizer so that they are easier to find . . . and then sync them to your Palm Lifedrive using kpilot.

I initially wrote this plugin to address some of my own needs: I have a submission web site which allows my students to turn in their projects electronically. The backend is a postgres database which tracks the due dates for the projects in each of my courses. It also uses CGI scripts to post a list of projects and their due dates on the web page for each course.

Over the summer, I took the time to explore Akonadi by writing an "Akonadi Resource" which uses my project submission web site as a storage backend. The resource can log in to my submit system, obtain a list of projects, and read them into Akonadi as calendar events. The project handout (usually a PDF file) is displayed as an attachment to the calendar event. I can also use it to add, remove, or modify events in the same way. I can post a new project to my server simply by dragging and dropping the handout file onto korganizer.

I was amazed at how easy it is to interface custom software with Akonadi. Writing a resource is ridiculously simple and straightforward. Most of the work is done for you by the "kapptemplate" tool. The remaining work only took me a few hours (with some help from the developers on #akonadi).

I have been happily posting projects using my resource, but decided it would be nice if I could post them directly from kword. After all, I write almost all of my handouts in kword. Wouldn't it be great if I could just click a "publish" button and let koffice do all the work?

It turns out that the koffice developers have created a very powerful plugin interface which allows you to write "Dockers" that can be embedded in the sidebar. So this week, I created a docker that does exactly what I wanted -- it pulls up a dialog which asks for project information (such as a due date) and uses that information to create a new calendar event in Akonadi. It also attaches any currently open (and saved) documents to the event.

While this suits my needs, I wanted to make it more general. So I wrote an "akonadi docker" plugin that will let you attach all your currently open documents to a new calendar event.

The "publish" button is in the sidebar on the right, but it can easily be moved wherever you want it to be.

The publishing dialog allows you to select an Akonadi storage folder and choose a title, location, start date, and end date for your event. You can also add comments.

You can see that all of the information I entered into the dialog now shows up in Korganizer. There is a "Streemer Meeting" event at the correct time and place.

I've posted the source code at http://gitorious.org/akonadi-docker/akonadi-docker. To compile it, simply grab the source with git and then do:

cd akonadi-docker
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

(You may need to use the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_DIR=[blah] flag to cmake to get everything installed in the correct place).

The code is still pretty rough. I need to add some checks for exceptional conditions (end date occurs before start date, for instance). It would also be nice if I could make it possible to only attach the "current" document, not all open documents and ensure that the document has been saved before it is published. I haven't yet mastered the koffice API to that extent, unfortunately.

Feel free to modify this code in any way you like. It's not very well commented, so if you want to shoot me questions, I'd love to help.

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If you have no idea what this means, don't worry, neither do I.

What I do know, however, is that a lot of people around KMail and are extremely happy about this

Basically the folks working hard on porting KDE PIM apps to Akonadi have reached one of their bonus mission goals: they've got rid of a very old, very obscure, tedious to maintain, mindboggling to work with (you get the picture, right?) legacy part of the mail handling framework.

Well, I guess bonus goal might give the wrong impression here. It is not less important than any of the primary mission objectives (to stay in game jargon). It is a bonus because it makes other things easier, boost your enthusiasm, lets you look forward for the challenges to come.
Think in terms of finding the double barrel shotgun in Doom, getting the Holy Grenade in Worms, looting an epic item in WoW, getting super cow powers in Aptitude.

So, congratulations to the folks at KDAB. You rock!

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On a related (to my other blog post today) note, while I'm giving credit where credit is due: my personal KDE hero at the moment is Anne Wilson, who has been helping KDEPIM users for years on our lists and at meetings and has been a voice of reason, courtesy, constructive feedback and positiveness that makes a huge difference in the atmosphere of our community. I much admire her work with the documentation team (userbase, anyone?) and the community working group and ever since I first met her in person (in Glasgow, I think) I have been impressed by the fearless and all embracing manner in which she has found her way amongst us weirdos and become a gentle, well respected leader and wrangler of geeks. I don't know when exactly it is, but happy 70th birthday, Anne, all the best from us PIMsters, we thank you and look forward to many more Akademy meetings with you.

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With all the excitement and energy surrounding Akonadi and the ongoing porting of our main applications to it at the moment (over 100 commits to KDEPIM yesterday alone!), it's easy to get the impression that we've collectively abandoned our stable versions and the many users relying on them today. Not so. While Volker Krause and his team at KDAB (currently Kevin Ottens, Frank Osterfeld, Sebastian Sauer, Leo Franchi, Stephen Kelly and Laurent Montel, with various others pitching in occasionally, like Marc, Guillermo and Romain) are ripping through KDEPIM trunk, Allen Winter and Thomas McGuire (again aided by Marc and others) are faithfully watching over the stable branches. They are making sure that all relevant bugfixes found by the Akonadi port make it back into the 3.x and 4.x stable branches and are doing many bugfixes and features in those branches themselves, every week, which are then merged into trunk. This results in a steady stream of improvements into both the 3.x and 4.x series, all of which make it to our users (i.e. you out there, probably) via the Linux distributions and via the KDE Windows and Mac packages regularly. This is mostly unglamorous and sometimes boring work which they carry out with great professionalism and personal commitment, both during their KDAB work time and well beyond, in their personal time. They hardly ever get any recognition for what they do, so this is an attempt to remedy that a bit. Rock on, boys!

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Not at the Akonadi sprint. Shame!
(You can find Tom's blog about it here and here)

Missing out on the API discussions would have been already bad enough, missing the presentation of my GSoC student and not getting to meet Brad Hards sucks.

Anyway. Despite not having fun^Wto do a lot of work in Berlin, I still have something Akonadi related to blog about.

The next couple of months I'll be working with a group of students from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France under a program initiated several years ago by The Other Kevin (also knowns ervin and, to some lesser extent, as Kevin Ottens ).

One of the nice things about Akonadi is its separation of concern. Developers can afford to concentrate on one specific area of interest such as providing awesome user interfaces or providing access to systems not designed to be used by desktop software or only one of a specific vendor.

Our French collegues are working on one of the latter, the Akonadi Forum Resource.

The concept behind this project is that we currently have a communication devide, a gap between two major groups in our community (users and developers) due to different preferences regarding communication channels.

So our idea is to build a bridge between two channels commonly used by each group: web base forum and (plain) text based newsgroups.
Users like the forum because it looks good, is convenient and accessible from any computer with an Internet connection.
Developers prefer using specialized software with features such as scoring (hide/show messages based on extensive rules) and loathe to wait for "unnecessary stuff" (e.g. fancy buttons, graphical emoticons, advances stylesheets) to be downloaded and processed.

The Akonadi Forum Resource is an attempt to develop a solution for this differences, by letting the developers (or anyone else with similar preferences) participate in the forum through newsgroup capable desktop software.

It will map the forum structure as newsgroup folders, forum topics as newsgroup threads and forum comments as newsgroup postings.
Depending on available time we are also considering access to forum personal messages and member and/or buddy lists.

That's all for now, stay tuned.

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If you're a developer interested in RSS in KDE (and maybe you are at GCDS right now), please scroll to the end.

Akregator development was slowed down for quite some time: The development team was basically reduced to one person, me, and I had not much time for it. That's why Akregator only slowly recovered from porting regressions introduced during the KDE4 port. Also, the article storage layer showed its limitations (see startup time and memory consumption) and the metakit backend implementation lacks robustness, thus it became clear that something must happen to make both the user experience pleasant and hacking Akregator fun again. Another long outstanding wish of mine was to decouple feed list handling and item storage from the core Application to a central desktop service, to make both accessible to other applications without the need to run Akregator.

Nowadays, the natural choice to achieve al this is to use Akonadi (although the idea was already in my head, before Akonadi even existed, I think). Luckily, Dmitry Ivanov came along and implemented RSS support for Akonadi (SVN, Dev-Wiki) as his last year's GSoC project.
It's currently going under the working title "krss" (we're still looking for the final name, so let the suggestions come). krss currently comes with two Akonadi resources (local feed list and one syncing with the Newsgator online reader) and libkrss, a client library for convenient access. There is also a little RSS reader, krssreader, which serves as demo application.

Dmitry did a great job here with designing and implementing krss, and also giving feedback (and sometimes debugging) to Akonadi. And, at least as important, he sticked around and now a year later, we decided that to go forward, stay motivated and to get to the real world usage scenarios, it's time for porting Akregator to Akonadi/krss, improving krss while doing so. We started with that a few weeks ago and to my own surprise, this went quite smoothly so far. After a few days, we had the basics ported and most of the old Feed and Article classes removed. Now, the port is already usable for feed reading (for certain definitions of "usable", that is). Data migration from Akregator also works, even if importing large Akregator archives shows some performance issues and the need for some more optimization sessions. Here's the mandatory screenshot:

Doesn't look too exciting? The UI of course didn't change much while porting, the only notable change there is that krss doesn't group feeds in hierarchical folders but in a flat set of tags: Every feed can have n tags assigned, and the pseudo-tag "All Feeds" lists all of them.

So what are our plans with krss?

• KDE 4.4, definitely: Finish the Akregator to Akonadi port and make krss ready for prime-time. The goal is to have all current Akregator features supported by 4.4.
• KDE 4.4, if possible: move libkrss to kdepimlibs. This is needed to have applications outside of KDE-PIM use krss. As this implies keeping a stable and binary-compatible API, we will do this only for 4.4 if we think the API is ready.
• Port applications, write new ones, add more shiny features.

Moving RSS handling to Akonadi, krss could help to improve the "RSS experience" for all of KDE by sharing feed list and item storage within existing applications such as Amarok, KTorrent or RSSNow! or easily writing new ones, e.g. a Konqueror plugin or a dedicated stand-Podcast client. Integration of RSS-enabled applications in KDE could be vastly improved, a topic deserving at least another blog entry. Its also time to reach out to the developers of the applications mentioned above to find out what's missing to fullfill their needs.

If you at GCDS and either working on an existing application using RSS, or have interest in krss and Akregator, just poke me. Or mail me, but it might take me some time until I read it). Depending on the interest, I might also set up a little BoF/informal meeting at the beach during next week. If you're not at GCDS, you are of course also invited to join the. It's the perfect time to get involved and make krss and its apps rock.

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While most core kdepim folks are knee-deep (neck-deep?) working on Akonadi and Akonadi migration issues, the bug reports and feature requests continue rolling-in at brisk pace for Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer, KAddressbook, Akregator, KTimeTracker, KJots and friends.

We PIMsters are a small group -- and we need fresh talent+brains+muscle.

So consider this my aperiodic plea for help.

If you have skills and time and love C++/Qt/KDE development, we'd be happy to have you join us. Feel free to drop by #kontact on irc.freenode.org or drop an email to kde-pim@kde.org.

PS. Please don't forget that we gladly accept patches in the KDEPIM group on reviewboard.kde.org. See Contribute/Send Patches on Techbase for more info.

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My talk from linux.conf.au 2009 is now available for everyone to see on video:
http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2009/Friday/72.ogg

The slides are also available in PDF and ODF.

There are a lot of other interesting videos also available - see
- http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2009/Wednesday/
- http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2009/Thursday/
- http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2009/Friday/

There are still some in work - you might like to check back occasionally.

I'd like to say a huge "love your work" to all those involved in the conference, and especially to the AV team, for making this available.

[Also, hello Planet Linux Australia. For those I haven't met yet, I'm a KDE and OpenChange hacker, based in Canberra.]

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On Friday, I gave my talk at linux.conf.au 2009.

I'm sure the slides (and the recordings will be up on the conference web site at some point), but you can get them from my site in ODP and PDF versions.

Thanks to all those who came along - much appreciated.

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I'm currently on my way back home to Berlin from a hit-and-run visit to the Osnabrück 7 KDEPIM meeting. It's just close enough for me to take a very early train in the morning and still be back home before midnight, which was the best I could do this year, due to other commitments. I'm really glad I did, as I'm leaving the others hacking and discussing with the kind of warm, joyous feeling of fulfillment one gets when a long and slow process seems to be coming together nicely and things align beautifully.

I still vividly remember our intense discussions years ago at a previous meeting in Osnabrück about our lack of new blood, the declining fun in working with an increasingly crufty code base, the ever rising bug count etc. and what to do about it all. One of the fundamental conclusions we came to was that if we wanted our project to survive longer term, attract new developers, restore our sense of fun, we would have to build something new, a foundation that we and others would want to hack on again, that KDE would embrace and that would allow us to build a kick-ass next generation infrastructure for PIM for ourselves and whoever else would want to use it. We realized back then, and throughout the process that concentrating our very scarce resources on something new could potentially mean jeopardizing the quality of our stable versions, making our users and partners unhappy and increasing the frustration in the short term. Luckily a few brave souls stepped up to help keep the old lady KDEPIM from keeling over while Volker lead the others on the Akonadi adventure.

So it is not without a sense of relief that I, and I think the other old KDEPIM farts as well, noted today that the new Intevation offices were filled with a whole new generation of PIMsters, eagerly hacking away on and with Akonadi and KDEPIM. There's a real sense of excitement around the project again, Tobias is making plans for KAddresbook again, Ingo is fixing KMail bugs again, things are moving forward with porting the main apps to Akonadi proper. It looks like we might succeed at retaining as much of the experience of those who've been doing this stuff for a while as we can to provide those who come into the project with a solid foundation to stand on. To build cool stuff with, and stick around to maintain it. To have fun with. Like Thomas, Tom, Bertjan, and Stephen, Bruno, Igor and Szymon, Kevin, Allen, the students from Toulouse and all the others who've more recently joined us and already made many great contributions. Of course not all of this positive development is due to Akonadi. But beyond solving technical problems I think it has allowed us to rally around a vision and helped keep the community from falling apart in frustration.

We have built it, and they have come. Feels great.

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Sound like magic you say?

I'd say you're right!

The White Wizard (also known as Volker Krause) has embedded a powerful spell in the KResource framework which summons a golem (also known as kres-migrator) and commands it to carefully transform your contact and calendar resources into a respective Akonadi setup.

As of last night the magical barrier holding the spell's power has been removed, so that all brave souls testing our snapshots and the upcoming 4.2 beta1 can help us improve the minion's capabilities to everbody's satisfaction.

Since a carefully crafted illusion is more popular with the common folks than just songs and stories, lets see what we can do about that.

KAddressBook when started with a traditional setup: three KResource plugins for different data backends.

Progress of Akonadi server startup

Report of the migration results: The "dir" and "LDAP" plugin based resources have been migrated using our compatibility bridges, the "file" plugin based resource has been migrated to the native Akonadi VCard handler.

KAddressBook after the migration: a new Akonadi based plugin containing all three data sources as "folders". The three traditional plugins are still present but have been deactivated.

Beware! The dark side hasn't slept either!
We have heard rumors that the following jinx can put an unholy barrier around our spell, effectively keeping the poor victim deprived of any Akonadi goodness:

% kwriteconfig --file kres-migratorrc --group Migration --key Enabled --type bool false

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