Kontact Status
Here you can see Mailody embedded in Kontact. You can see it fits in there, as it always have been there. On the top of Mailody you can put your favorite folders. That way you can collapse the regular folder sidebar and have a lot more room to see your mails and the message list.
In the past I had a copy of the kontact interface classes in Mailody, because they were living in kdepim. Last month the issue was raised again why it was located there. Because, when living in kdepim it shielded from the outside world and application developers were discouraged to using it. The main reason from my point of view was that with the upcoming move to Akonadi we would like to keep the option open to adjust Kontact if needed. Moving it to kdepimlibs would mean staying binary compatible.
On the other hand we have seen little development to kontact the last few years. I argued that the reason there has been little development might be in the fact it is not really out there for people to use. The end result of the discussion is that we all agreed to moving it to kdepimlibs. The versioning of the plugins should prevent loading binary incompatible plugins.
That means from KDE 4.4 on people can embed their application to Kontact without nasty tricks. By making that possible I hope we can see a healthy amount of application which can be embedded. One point to note is that if your application is a uniqueapplication, you should use pimuniqueapplication so launching your application for a second time will result in kontact raising and showing your part within kontact.
With opening up Kontact for external application I also hope we see some more development for Kontact itself. I think the summary view is an excellent candidate to be plasmafied. Using Plasma and writing plasmoids for each application make sense. People can put up Lionmail applet on the summary view, a nice calendar widget, but also for example the current weather or a currency converter. Currently we have no takers for this feature, if you are interested, drop by the #kontact channel.
This is good. Instead of “Mailody”, the icon should say “Mail” as well. Something like a generic component name should be configurable.
@David KMail has already claimed ‘Mail’, so I don’t want to cause confusion.
It’s the mail page, you don’t cause confusion by calling it ‘Mail’, you cause confusion by calling it anything but ‘Mail’. This label is not about an application name, but about functionality.
That GUI looks like crap atm :\
@sebas If I enable KMail there will be two times a ‘Mail’.
@Dread Knight Would be nice if you explain why it looks like crap instead of this useless comment.
As an end user of the Kontact program,the program is more “Information Central” than a business tool.
One feature that puts Kontact above the others, is being able to “drag” an e-mail to the calendar as an event.
I’ve been looking for work, and the e-mail/event is more of a permanent record of a job search than to-dos – to-dos are less secure as to the purge function.
Being able to “link” a journal to an event would be a plus also.
Otherwise, an excellent PIM!
I wanted to say the same about mail too. Normally a user should be only using one mail program. How about determening the component which can claim the name “Mail” by the one the user chooses in user setting? So for 99% of the users this will work this way, no matter which client they choose. If a user chooses to activate a second mail client, either both appear with their application name or the application which is not the standard app.
I like the GUI. keep going!
@toma The common case is to only use one email client :-)
I understand that it can be really handy for email client developing, but that also doesn’t seem a too common business ;)
@sebas Okido, I’ve just changed it to show ‘Mail’. Thanks all for the feedback!
Your line about Plasma in Kontact immediately reminded me of Spicebird (someone referred it to me some time ago)http://www.spicebird.com/category/image-galleries/spicebird-screenshots/spicebird-beta-07-screenshots :)
One thing I do wonder is whether it will be (technically?) possible for an individual application not to crash Kontact (and therefore close all other applications) when it crashes. I had this experience with it a few releases ago that Akregator would crash everything, so I ended up not using Kontact at all.
Dread Knight, October 4th, 2009 at 18:42
That GUI looks like crap atm :\
toma, October 4th, 2009 at 18:47
@Dread Knight Would be nice if you explain why it looks like crap instead of this useless comment.
I think Dread Knight meant widget theme. And I agree – it’s ugly (see problematic zones here – http://img41.yfrog.com/img41/9759/mailodyinkontact.png ). BTW – this is one of the questions that i have for years – why there no decent default theme for GTK and Qt apps? At least like in Windows 3.11?
Nice to see some work on this front.
A few things about the interface:
The folderview is pretty much useless in this state. No single foldername is visible in it’s entirety. Instead of the “…”, just print the name until the end of screen space and then cut it off. Remove the “unread” and “total” columns and just instead put the number of unread mails in brackets behind the folder name and then you have twice amount the space for the folder name and a lot less clutter as a bonus.
The favorite folder view on top of the program also looks very cluttered due to varying width of the items. Don’t know what to do about that though. Wordwrap, fixed width with cutoff maybe. Also, it wastes a lot of vertical space due to there being a lot of whitespace.