Decrypted Mind

January/February in KDE PIM

Mar 2, 2022 kde kontact

Since the last summary two months ago we have seen the 21.12.3 patch releases of Kontact, and more than 1200 changes by 35 contributors have been integrated. Around 20 people helped to process nearly 120 merge requests the last two months, reviewing and finally merging over 80 of them.

Calendaring

The new notification-based reminder service can now launch KOrganizer or Kalendar respectively to view or edit the corresponding event. The notifications with geolocation data attached to your event or task will now open your default mapping application. The reminder service is planned to replace the previous dialog-based one for 22.04.

The identity management library has been restructured to reduce the runtime dependencies of the reminder daemon as well as other background services.

The public holidays list for several countries has been updated.

Kalendar

The Kalendar team released Kalendar 1.0, our last standalone release before moving to the KDE Gear release service.

Slawek Kaplonski worked on some small usability improvements by making for example drag and drop possible for all-day events too, and added some animation when using the 'Now' button.

Claudio Cambra continued working on making Kalendar more stable by fixing a lot of bugs. He also made many subtle user interface improvements: for example, he added the calendar's color in a few more places in the user interface.

Carl Schwan worked on making Kalendar also work with Right-To-Left languages like Arabic and Hebrew and added a progress indicator to the task list.

You can find all the changes here.

Choosing Task Calendar showing color

Kleopatra

  • Joey Berkovitz made sure that keys stored on smart cards are fully usable with Kleopatra as soon as Kleopatra has encountered the smart card. T5782, pim/kleopatra!11
  • Secret subkeys can now be exported without the secret primary key. This is useful if you want to share the encryption subkey of a shared email address. This is possible from the Details dialog of OpenPGP keys.
  • Settings that are marked as read-only (via KDE's Kiosk support or via global GnuPG options) cannot be changed anymore in the configuration dialog. T5791
  • One can now easily retrieve all OpenPGP keys that another OpenPGP key was certified with. Additionally, it's now possible to configure Kleopatra to retrieve all certification keys of newly imported keys automatically. T5805
  • One can now trigger a restart of the background processes (gpg-agent, dirmngr, scdaemon, etc.), e.g. after one has changed their configuration. T5775
  • Usability and accessibility of Kleopatra's main view, i.e. the certificate list, T5841 and of the OpenPGP key generation T5832 was improved. This is part of the major goal to make Kleopatra fully accessible. T5824

KAlarm

  • Allow calendars and date picker to be shown together in side panel #440250
  • Cancel sound file playback if audio alarm edit dialog is closed after clicking Try.
  • Fix failure to create a missing calendar file after enabling a resource.
  • Fix crash after Defer is selected in alarm notification message #448212
  • Fix deleted calendar resources reappearing when KAlarm restarts.
  • Fix auto-close not working for message windows after the timeout period.

KMail

Laurent Montel finished a new kmail plugin “Open Url With”, that allows one to launch specific apps for a specific URL. For example RocketChat can send notification email when a user wants to speak to you (when ruqola/rocketchat client is down). Now you can directly open ruqola and not Firefox, when clicking the URL.

Dialog to create a specific launch action List of URL actions

Contacts

The address formatting code in the KContacts framework has been rewritten and now covers significantly more countries, supports multiple formatting styles (single- or multi-line, domestic or international, postal mail) and scripts other than Latin. This is expected in KF 5.92 and will subsequently be used in applications. frameworks/kcontacts/!34.

Itinerary

Itinerary receiving new features, such as manually added train and bus trips, or new additional information displayed in the timeline. It can now display the currency conversion rates for your trips. When you use Plasma 5.24 you can now select the default application to open geo links.

There is an own bi-monthly blog that you can check out here.

"Plasma System Settings default geo: URL handler configuration."

One patch highlights

Infrastructure

A lot of work was put into building KDE PIM libraries and applications successfully on Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6. Additionally libraries get new names in Qt6 (e.g. like Grantlee is renamed to ktexttemplate). The new name expresses better what the library is used for.

Inside kdepim repository names do not necessarily match to the Bugzilla projects/components. In the past the release team was not updating Bugzilla version information for those repositories. Together with the release team we helped to handle the connection repository <-> Bugzilla correctly to get a full list of versions for all Bugzilla products. sysadmin/release-tools!18

The benefits are that we now get more precise metadata on bug reports, and users can see and select from the full list of released versions. Additionally we have correct links in Invent to Bugzilla.

The technical details about Bugzilla information in the project API can be seen here.

Invent pointing to correct Bugzilla product

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. And/or get in touch with us by email, Matrix #kontact:kde.org or IRC #kontact:libera.chat! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your questions. Read more here…