The year of Kube

After having reached the first milestone of a read-only prototype of Kube, it’s time to provide a lookout of what we plan to achieve in 2016.
I have put together a Roadmap, of what I think are realistic goals that we can achieve in 2016. Obviously this will evolve over time and we’ll keep adjusting this as we advance faster/slower or simply move in other directions.

Since we’re building a completely new technology stack, a lot of the roadmap revolves around ensuring that we can create what we envision technology wise,
and that we have the necessary infrastructure to move fast while having confidence in the quality. It’s important that we do this before growing the codebase too much so we can still make the necessary adjustments without having too much code to adjust.

On the UX side we’ll want to work on concepts and prototypes, although we’ll probably keep the first implemented UI’s to something fairly simple and standard.
Over time we have to build a vision where we want to go in the long run so this can steer the development. This will be a long and ongoing process involving not only wire-frames and mockups, but hopefully also user research and analysis of our problem space (how do we communicate rather than how does GMail work).

However, since we can’t just stomp that grander vision out of the ground, the primary goal for us this year, is a simple email client that doesn’t do much, but does what it does well. Hopefully we can go beyond that with some other components available (calendar, addressbook, …), or perhaps something simple available on mobile already, but we’ll have to see how fast it goes first. Overall we’ll want to focus on quality rather than quantity to prove what quality level we’re able to reach and to ensure we’re well lined up to move fast in the following year(s).

The Roadmap

I split the roadmap into four quarters, each having it’s own focus. Note that Akonadi Next has been renamed to Sink to avoid confusion (now that Akonadi 5 is released and we planned for Akonadi2…).

1. Quarter

Milestones:
– Read-only Kube Mail prototype.
– Fully functional Kube Mail prototype but with very limited functionality set (read and compose mail).
– Testenvironment that is also usable by designers.
– Logging mechanism in Sink and potentially Kube so we can produce comprehensive logs.
– Automatic gathering of performance statistics so we can benchmark and prove progress over time.
– The code inventory¹ is completed and we know what features we used to have in Kontact.
– Sink Maildir resource.
– Start of gathering of requirements for Kube Mail (features, ….).
– Start of UX design work.

We focus on pushing forward functionality wise, and refactoring the codebase every now and then to get a feeling how we can build applications with the new framework.
The UI is not a major focus, but we may start doing some preparatory work on how things eventually should be. Not much attention is paid to usability etc.
Once we have the Kube Mail prototype ready, with a minimum set of features, but a reasonable codebase and stability (so it becomes somewhat useful for the ones that want to give it a try), we start communicating about it more with regular blogposts etc.

2. Quarter

Milestones:
– Build on Windows.
– Build on Mac.
– Comprehensive automated testing of the full application.
– First prototype on Android.
– First prototype on Plasma Mobile?
– Sink IMAP resource.
– Sink Kolab resource.
– Sink ICal resource.
– Start of gathering of performance requirements for Kube Mail (responsiveness, disk-usage, ….)
– Define target feature set to reach by the end of the year.

We ensure the codebase builds on all major platforms and ensure it keeps building and working everywhere. We ensure we can test everything we need, and work out what we want to test (i.e. including UI or not). Kube is extended with further functionality and we develop the means to access a Kolab/IMAP Server (perhaps with mail only).

3. Quarter

Milestones:
– Prototype for Kube Shell.
– Prototype for Kube Calendar.
– Potentially prototype for other Kube applications.
– Rough UX Design for most applications that are part of Kube.
– Implementation of further features in Kube Mail according to the defined feature set.

We start working on prototypes with other datatypes, which includes data access as well as UI. The implemented UI’s are not final, but we end up with a usable calendar. We keep working on the concepts and designs, and we approximately know what we want to end up with.

4. Quarter

Milestones:
– Implementation of the final UI for the Kube Mail release.
– Potentially also implementation of a final UI for other components already.
– UX Design for all applications “completed” (it’s never complete but we have a version that we want to implement).
– Tests with users.

We polish Kube Mail, ensure it’s easy to install and setup on all platforms and that all the implemented features work flawlessly.

Progress so far

Currently we have a prototype that has:
– A read-only maildir resource.
– HTML rendering of emails.
– Basic actions such as deleting a mail.

My plan is to hook the Maildir resource up with offlineimap, so I can start reading my mail in Kube within the next weeks 😉

Next to this we’re working on infrastructure, documentation, planning, UI Design…
Current progress can be followed in our Phabricator projects ²³, and the documentation, while still lagging behind, is starting to take shape in the “docs/” subdirectory of the respective repositories⁴⁵.

There’s meanwhile also a prototype of a docker container to experiment with available ⁶, and the Sink documentation explains how we currently build Sink and Kube inside a docker container with kdesrcbuild.

Join the Fun

We have weekly hangouts on that you are welcome to join (just contact me directly or write to the kde-pim mailinglist). The notes are on notes.kde.org and are regularly sent to the kdepim mailinglist as well.
As you can guess the project is in a very early state, so we’re still mostly trying to get the whole framework into shape, and not so much writing the actual application. However, if you’re interested in trying to build the system on other platforms, working on UI concepts or generally tinker around with the codebase we have and help shaping what it should become, you’re more than welcome to join =)

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1. git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/aseigo/KontactCodebaseInventory.git ↩
2. https://phabricator.kde.org/project/profile/5/ ↩
3. https://phabricator.kde.org/project/profile/43/ ↩
4. git://anongit.kde.org/akonadi-next ↩
5. git://anongit.kde.org/kontact-quick ↩
6. https://github.com/cmollekopf/docker/blob/master/kubestandalone/run.sh ↩

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