Until a few weeks ago, I had Kubuntu running on my Acer Aspire 5630 laptop (as described here), and was more or less satisfied. It looked great, hardware support was satisfying, but I was missing the incremental package upgrades that I was used to on Debian (so that things break one small piece at a time, not everything at the same time when you do an upgrade).

As I wrote in my last blog, KOrganizer now has the ability to export the calendar to all different kinds of formats using technology called XSLT transformations. The only thing that I'm missing (because I'm entirely bad at those things) are good designs that I can implement. So I'm looking for nice and visually appealing designs of how calendar exports might look. Possible export formats are e.g.

• SVG graphics
• HTML (to-do list, calendar, journal, showing just one event)
• PDF output

Just be creative! In principle, one can create anything from the calendar data, from A0 wall poster calendars to A8 pocket sheets, from SVG graphics showing the calendar with a nice holiday picture in the background to professional-looking calendar books.
Of course, with SVG and HTML it would be much easier for me to implement if your design is already in SVG or HTML.

BTW, if anyone wants to try it out, the KOrganizer plugin is currently in the kdepim-3.5.5+ branch for new features to 3.5 (branches/work/kdepim-3.5.5+/korganizer/plugins/xslt/ in SVN). To work with the 3.5 branch, just copy that directory over and it should work. You'll have to enable the plugins in korganizer's config dialog before you can see them in the "File -> Export" menu, though. There are some proof-of-concept style sheets available already (for HTML, SVG, CSV, etc.), but they are mostly dummy styles and do not really produce any useful output (and if they do, the output is plain ugly, so I won't give an example here).

XSLT is a W3 specification that allows general transformations from XML into practically any other format (mainly XML, but you can also create any text).
In the kdepim 3.5.5+ feature branch I just added a plugin to korganizer, that exports the calendar into XML and then applies an XSLT transformation to it to generate all different kinds of output... For example, one can write an XSLT style sheet for some fancy HTML export, or for CSV export, or to XSL-FO to generate nice PDFs. One might even generate SVGs from the calendar.

And the best of all: All these export styles are not hard-coded in C++, but they are pure xml files that can be edited by anyone (okay, not really anyone, you need to know XSLT). Due to KDE's nice standard dirs approach, there are some system-wide style sheets, but each user can also add her/his own style sheets in one's home directory.

Unfortunatly, I'm not much of a graphics or web designer, so the output of the transforms is currently really ugly (and not completely implemented in XSLT, either). But at least the technology is there, now only the style sheets have to be implemented and polished.

Once upon a time, there were all those nice, separate applications that were somehow meant for various PIM tasks like mail, calendar, addressbook, etc. To make the world an even better place (and to share resources), they decided to unite, join forces and create this wonderful application, called Kontact. Just like one large family, they worked together and due to the large number of active developers the project flourished.

But then, reality set in: Most of the developers got a real job, and suddenly they painfully found their time for KDE dramatically cut or even completely reduced to no time at all.

Unfortunately, that's our current situation in KDE-PIM. There is hardly anyone left (Till is working on his thesis, Ingo recently started a new job, Cornelius is in the e.V. board, Ade has the EBN and is on the e.V. board, I have a job plus some other commitments, etc.), only Volker and Tobias working on Akonadi, and of course, Allen Winter fixing bugs all over the place.

So, to put it short: We really need some help! As much help as we can get, in fact.

If you are at aKademy, there's the easy route to get involved: Just join our BoF on Tuesday, 17:00! Otherwise, just join us on #kontact on IRC or subscribe and send a mail to kde-pim@kde.org.

About a week ago, my laptop broke -- completely broke in the sense that not only does the machine not work any longer, it even trashed my whole harddisk. Now I'm at aKademy without a laptop and still one whole afternoon of the KDE e.V. general assembly left to sit through... Oh, how much I envy all those developers sitting in there with their laptops, hacking on KDE stuff!

Fortunately I brought my book about Austrian criminal law with me to entertain me through lengthy boring discussions.

As I wrote in my last blog, my to-do list for KOrganizer keeps growing and growing (sure, I implement / fix lots of stuff, but it seems that its still a long way to make KOrganizer perfect). So, I thought, I bet there are a bunch of interested guys and gals out there who were always interested in kdepim development, but never really dared to take on some open issue.

So here is a short list of some Junior Jobs (JJs), which I think are not too hard to implement, and which would serve as nice small projects to get familiar with our code:

• Add an "File->Import->Import Calendar Resource" item (see http://www.userbrain.de/kdepim/korganizer_menu.html, Suggestion 4 for the File Menu). This would basically do the same like the add in the resource view or in the kcontrol resource configuration..
• Write a "How to upload Hot New Stuff" (also see the above menu proposal by our usability expert Ellen)
• Add a menu item / toolbar button to let the user select a date to jump to. (see again the above proposal)
• Add a menu to quickly toggle the alarm for the selected item. In the agenda view's RMB (right mouse button) menu this functionality is already available, it's just not currently available to all other views.
• The default reminder time currently has only 5 possible values (in the config dialog). Extend this to use any hh:mm value (using the same time widget as the default length) and use this offset in the editor dialog.
• If you are working on a manually opened calendar file, and you import a file, the option to import it as resource should not be shown (since there is no resource calendar available).
• etc, etc.

If you need any help or you want to work on any of these, or you have other ideas or questions, just join us either on IRC in the channel #kontact (on the server irc.kde.org), or at the mailing list kde-pim@kde.org...

There are also several open bug reports / wish list items at http://bugs.kde.org, so if you see something that fits you, just tell us. We'll definitely help anyone get familiar with our kdepim code!
And we can use anyone who want to help us make kde-pim even better!

Actually, today I wanted to do some serious bug fixing and reduce the number of items on my to-do list, but then I didn't get beyond one of them: Multiple reminders in KOrganizer.
Actually, like so many other features, multiple reminders were already supported by libkcal as well as by korgac (the reminder daemon), it was just the GUI component that was missing. I added that today, so it's now possible to have :

• reminders before / after the start / end date of an event
• multiple reminders per event
• repeating reminders

Seems like korganizer in kde 3.5 will also have some new stuff to show off...

Actually, this feature implements our second-most requested wish for korganizer... And it fixes some problems identified by our usability guys / gals. (BTW, they are doing a tremendous job! Just look at http://openusability.org/projects/kdepim/ and http://www.userbrain.de/kdepim/. The only problem is that this keeps my to-do list of open issues growing immensely )

KDE is simply amazing. There you are, the current developer and maintainer of your application, and you think you know your application inside out and you are aware of all the small features it provides to the user...

To be honest: While I really love the added functionality that subversion brings (offline diffs/reverts, atomic commits), websvn (or rather the viewcvs that we use on websvn.kde.org) just sucks for my use.

As Bram noticed in his blog, I haven't been working much on KOrganizer lately. That's for several reasons:

• Lack of time (as usual, since I have my day job at university, and several other hobbies),
• I needed some time off KDE after the release and all the time that I spent on writing the groupware resources in the last few weeks before the relase. And
• Recently I started rewriting the whole Recurrence stuff in libkcal so that libkcal now (not committed yet) supports everything that rfc 2445 defines (multiple RRULES, EXDATEs, RDATEs, EXRULEs, even multiple EXRULEs, arbitrary combinations of the BY* components, etc.). It's not yet completely finished, but it looks really promising. (And no, don't worry, I won't submit it during the NL meeting and break everyone's kdepim during a pim-meeting)