Not sure what it is with German ICE’s, but always when i use them,,I get the urge to write a blog. Probably due to the fact that I get bored in them, there are power sockets and stuff happening around you. Today a large scream of one of the Bahn employees asked rather loudly who owned the folded bicycle near the door. One passenger hesitated but raised his hand. From the back the employee continued to scream to that passenger that the bicycle needs a ‘bag’ and started to tell him he should have read the fine prints. Anyhow the passenger was told to get a ‘bag’ or leave the train at the next stop. Come on, at these moments I’m feel shamed to be a human, it really makes me wonder if I fit in The Netherlands or Germany. Maybe I would feel better at home in some country that’s much more relaxed at these things. Anyhow, the passenger fetched a bag -normally used to throw away trash, and the crises was averted. Phew.

I’m en route to Freiburg, which seems to be close to Basel. There the Nepomuk meeting will kick off around 4pm. I’ve prepared my home computer to have the latest KDE trunk with Nepomuk fully active, I first tried the virtuoso backend, but that seemed a bad idea, the sesame2 backend seems to work fine though. I fixed Mailody to be able to tag messages again, and hopefully you can also add comments to mails at the end of this weekend.

I also need to rethink what I want to do with Mailody exactly. It is very tempting to make one application which can deal with Mail, News, RSS and Microblogs – just because I can do that with Akonadi. It also fits the concept of folders with items in there, so it should not be to hard to do. The question is if that will result in a nice application which fulfills all my information needs, or if that will result in a huge monster with all kinds of hacks in there to facilitate the tiny differences between those information flows.

I’m more and more thinking that it might result in a monster and that it should not be done that way. The choice would have been easy when there was a nicely maintained Kontact. If that would have been maintained properly it would be the best to get all kinds of specialized small applications, dedicated to doing one task and nicely working together to inform the user properly. For companies I think a good working Kontact is pretty vital, it can be the difference between choosing KDE or one of our competitors. It’s a shame that nobody is giving it the love it deserves. One of the problems Mailody ran into it that kontact does not have a possibility to use QDockWidgets in the part it loads. That has to do with a non-existing mainwindow iirc. So in Mailody all kinds of hacks are needed to work around that, for example, the folder list is a QDockWidget so users can decide for themselves if they want to have it left, right, t the bottom or even floating. With Mailody embedded in kontact that option does not exists, it s just fixed at the left.

Maybe with the current time I have, it is better to focus on the mail part of the application and don’t try to create a one-application-for-everything. It will be difficult enough to maintain that as long as I do all the work myself. First todo is to get the new IMAP resource tested. Well, the real first todo is the nepomuk meeting. More later…….