RSIBreak
I got some reports that the settings dialog was broken. When I checked SVN it was already fixed, so I just needed to make a new release. Will Stephenson gave the finishing touch and after that I used the createtarballs script to generate a new tarball. The only thing which stands in the way of making a release candidate is the fact that the plasma applet is currently broken. a new contributor started to work on the applet, but seems to have disapeared. So if there is someone out there with plasma knowledge, please make the rsibreak applet behave, the engine is there, the rsibreak code is nice, just requires an hour hacking. ;-)

I even updated the site together with a co-worker. She did the layout, i updated the content.

The official state of rsibreak is kind of weird, officially I’ve given up on it, not because i don’t like the app or don’t need it anymore, it is just that i’ve too little time. But it completely works, so I keep maintaining it in maintenance mode until a new eager hacker stands up and wants to take over.

Mailody
Last week I returned in hacking mode for a while. I seriously want to start using Mailody4 rather soon now. So in the private hacking weekend i had, i started to simply fix each and every bug i hit. After two days it finally got somewhere. At the end of this month there will be a Akonadi hacking weekend. I hope we find time there to squash another set of bugs on the Akonadi side, so I can use Mailody4 full time after that. Akonadi has seen a lot of progress lately. Stabalisation fixes and error handling is improved…

Release-team
The release team is kind of working allright. Now and then you simply hit the fact that it is not always easy to make decisions while you are in a group. When one person proposes something and ten people reply, it often results in some kind of deadlock which has to be resolved. In this case David Faure stepped up and pulled the tags-for-kdesupport into reality. It’s great that someone steps up and does that. Though I’m not completely sure this happens all the time, some kind of a ‘leader’ could make things easier, but we’re not a company, so that does not exists. Not that it is not possible when you are not a company, it’s just that it is not natural. Ah well, you get what I mean.

Community Working group
Another project I wish I could spend time on. Jucato already explained a lot about userbase, and I’m happy to see the other members of the CWG getting this of the ground. It seems to gain momentum. I think it is awesome that there is a techbase for users. It can serve as first stop for users to see if their problem is covered in a FAQ already.

As you might have figured, I’m trying to integrate with every technology that is Hot. Today I decided to sidetrack from the Nepomuk integration and do another one in the meanwhile.

[img_assist|nid=248|title=|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=515|height=431]

What you see in the image is the route of a mail message. You can see the origin of a mail in the map and how the message got to you…

It analyses the headers, grabs the ip-addresses of the mail servers, translates them to coordinates, start the MarbleWidget and draws the items on there.

Currently I use the unmaintained http://netgeo.caida.org-site to give me the coordinates which belong to an ip-address. I’m not so happy with that. I rather use the geoclue system, but I don’t really understand how to implement it.

Maybe someone has an idea what I can use best for the conversion from ip-address to location? Find me on freenode irc, nickname toma or leave a message.

Isn’t it great to have two Pilars of KDE in the subject? Anyway, this weekend I started working on Nepomuk. The end goals is simple, I want to tag my e-mails and have the possibility to enter a comment about them.

First step was trying to get some basic interaction with Nepomuk. They seem to change their API a lot, so it took some time and help from DanielW on #nepomuk-kde to get that working. Afer that I went looking for a widget that could be used for this.

I actually like the complete widget that Dolphin uses, but that’s not available in KDE libs and I did not want to go throught the process of doing the move. Luckely Nepomuk provides a tiny widget which can be integrated easily and does not take to much space in Mailody. I’ve put it in a QDockWidget so people can put it at the bottom of the complete Mailody window if they need more space. It now looks like this:

[img_assist|nid=245|title=Mailody meets Nepomuk|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=453|height=166]

On the right there is a little arrow and if you press it, you see a popup with all existing tags so you can easily assign them to a message. Whenever you switch between messages the area shows the assigned tags.

Assigning is fun, but you need to be able to do anything with it, right? Right. Of course you can use the kioslave to search for the tag and get all the messages which are tagged with that tag, but that should also be possible in Mailody.

So I implemented an Akonadi Resource for it. Similar to an IMAP resource that shows you the folders of an account, the Nepomuk tags resource shows you a folder for each tag, selecting it brings out all the messages that belong to that tag. It looks like this:

[img_assist|nid=246|title=Akonadi meets Nepomuk|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=391|height=224]

To get it to work Volker Krause implemented the LinkJob and UnlinkJob in the Akonadi KDE library. This makes it possible to link certain messages from there original folders to a virtual folder. The server was already prepared to handle this kind of Virtual Folders. What would we do without Volker?

Conclusion is that it is now possible to tag your emails with any tag you like and retrieve the messages with a certain tag just as easily. Next step is to implement the possibility to make comments on mails.

After Akademy I decided that Webkit is a thing to explore more. The presentation and demonstration of Simon Hausmann at Akademy was very impressive. Not only by the capabilities QtWebKit, but also by the way the way they are working.

So, I decided to switch from KHTMLPart for displaying the messages to QWebView. Not everyone knows that even plain text messages are converted to HTML messages before they are shown. This is needed to make links clickable for example. KMail does that too btw. But of course simple text messages converted to html render perfectly in almost any html-rendering-engine.

The port to QtWebKit went pretty smoothly, although there are one or two small problems left. The rendering for most of my testcases / messages seems pretty much identical. Although I found some mails that look that much better now, for example:

[img_assist|nid=242|title=HTMLPart|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=100|height=51]

[img_assist|nid=243|title=QWebView|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=100|height=59]

But I don’t hold KHTMLPart responsible for that, html mails send by some clients are ugly and made without any kind of specs in mind. btw, while debugging I used the Arora browser, that’s actually a very nice browser.

[img_assist|nid=236|title=mailody-in-kontact|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=200|height=148]

Here you can see Mailody embedded in Kontact. A wish a lot of people have asked me in the past few years. So there you have it.

There still is a lot of work to do, mainly due to kontact bugs and limitation I think though:
- I’ve no idea how the statusbar is supposed to work in the embedded mode, so I just disabled most of it.
- I’ve no idea why my Mailody toolbar isn’t visible in Kontact.
- I’ve no idea why QDockWidgets in my composer (separate QMainWindow) do not work at all or why the toolbar isn’t visible.
- I’ve no idea why I’ve all those duplicates in the left bar

So, if you are interested in fixing one of those, let me know ;-) I’m happy the initial integration is there though.