Calendar progress

As we’re closing in on a simple but functional calendar for Kube, I’d like to share our progress with you.

We’ve decided to start with a week view, as that seems to be a good compromise between information density and enough information for day-to-day use.
We will eventually complement that with a month view, which is probably all we need for the time being.

An agenda view will probably rather become part of a separate view, showing you upcoming events, tasks that need to be taken care of, important emails, ….

Anyhow, here’s the week view:

Screenshot_20180823_103304

This view is based on two models, one for full-day events (on top) and one for the rest below. The models each query for all events that overlap with the time-range shown, which we can do efficiently due to the work of Rémi on the calendar queries. That means we really only have to deal with a few events in memory, which we can easily do on the spot. The models then do their magic to calculate the position and sizes of all the necessary boxes, so all we have to do in QML is paint them. This now also includes recurring events, although we’re not dealing with exceptions just yet.

The colors of the events are taken from the calendar, which gets synchronized via CalDAV. This is a tradeoff design wise because you can bet that those colors will not match Kube in any way. But we decided that Kube should work well with other devices and clients, and the color is a major factor to recognize immediately what belongs where. Perhaps we can still make the colors a bit easier on the eye by desaturating them a bit, we’ll have to see.

Otherwise there is dimming of the past, and a blue line indicating the current time. Simple and without distractions.

The next steps are going to be adding a detail view, as well as a simple editor, and then we should already have the basics for your daily needs.

We’re still running a Kolab Now promotion for Kube! For more information head over to: blogs.kolabnow.com/2018/08/29/kube-campaign-last-chance

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Author: cmollekopf

Christian Mollekopf is an open source software enthusiast with a special interest in personal organization tools. He started to contribute actively to KDE in 2008 and currently works for Kolab Systems leading the development for the next generation desktop client.

11 thoughts on “Calendar progress”

  1. I started using Kube (installed the Flatpak). The one feature that I think it really needs is the ability to store password, because I’m using a Google App Password, and I don’t really remember it. And without the password, I can’t access my email.

    1. Yeah, not having a keyring is a bummer. I think the first “proper” keyring that we’ll do will use the accounts gpg-key to store the password in an encrypted file. That way we have a keyring that works on all platforms, and we need the gpg keyring anyways for encrypted mails.

        1. Every desktop environment has it’s own keyring implementation, so either we’d integrate into those, which is going to be a bunch of work, or we just use the gpg-keyring, which we anyways rely on.

  2. Hello,
    This application flatpak requires me to install Gnome, which I won’t use otherwise. Is there a workaround?
    $ flatpak -y –user install –from https://files.kube-project.com/flatpak/com.kubeproject.kube.flatpakref
    Required runtime for com.kubeproject.kube/x86_64/master (runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/1.6) found in remote gnome
    Installing in user:
    org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/1.6 gnome ea1a12e21086
    org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default/x86_64/1.6 gnome fefd42de91fd
    org.freedesktop.Platform.VAAPI.Intel/x86_64/1.6 gnome f5b764620d7b
    org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg/x86_64/1.6 gnome e01955d7feef
    org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale/x86_64/1.6 gnome 5bc67811966f
    com.kubeproject.kube/x86_64/master com.kubeproject.kube-origin 3b029cc6abe9
    permissions: ipc, network, wayland, x11, dri
    file access: /tmp, host
    tags: nightly
    Installing for user: org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/1.6 from gnome
    [####################] 1 metadata, 0 content objects fetched; 313 B transferred in 1 seconds
    error: Failed to install org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/1.6: While trying to checkout ea1a12e21086ec56bba0c83a6e97511109cb300cc9deb2dbb1e1e3e68d91aa65 into /home/bogdanbiv/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/1.6/.ea1a12e21086ec56bba0c83a6e97511109cb300cc9deb2dbb1e1e3e68d91aa65-L4LUTZ: Opening content object cc700d46f407c6c5ab2d5dde474366a928b7398277e61162e7f8ec06f469f07e: fgetxattr: No data available

  3. Am one of those persons tired of Kontact’s bugs and limitations, present release after release. Not underestimating K’s devs work, much the contrary, they have achieved great things considering the scarce human resources they have, but in almost 2019 it still looks and behaves much like an early 2000s PIM suite, even its interface seems outdated. Well, maybe this last is not its fault but oldfashioned QT5 Breeze theme’s, I don’t know.
    Anyway, this afternoon someone talked in a Telegram group about Kube as the light at the end of the tunnel in Linux PIM, so I did some “searx”and found the apps website and this blog.
    Seems promising, but I’m feared it’s become abandonware maybe? The last update is from July, and the last blog post here is from august. So, my obvious question is: Is Kube still being developed? And also, if yes, do you think that a 0.7 release is data safe and stable enough to start using it for serious PIM or better wait for a 1.0 or 1.1 release at least?

    Thank you.

    1. It’s not abandoned. I’m not going to make any stability promises for the time being, I suggest you just try it and see how far it gets you.
      For me it works as a daily driver, but for others it doesn’t just yet, YMMV.

  4. Hello,

    I’ve been trying Kube for a while and I wanted to say thanks for the great work! It feels very clean and refreshing and I am now going to use it more for my daily use and report bugs.

    I could not find how to use the calendar though. I entered a CalDAV address but I cannot see how to make it appear.

    What format must the calendar link be? Does it need to be the .ics or just the address

    I use Build of Kube Thu Feb 7 02:08:54 CET 2019

  5. The interface looks awesome. Poor old Kmail looks so 2000-ish, as some other poster commented before… Kube’s look really clean, modern and agreeable. Great work! 😀
    But I wanted to know if you plan to add Markdown support for the mail. Nothing against full HTML mail support, but most of the time just some basic format options would be sufficient. Besides, is way quicker to type some MD modifiers than using a toolbar with icons to click and such. Is MD mail composing expected in the “finished” version of Kube?

    1. Better late than never. Thanks for the kind words =)
      Personally I’d love to have markdown support, but don’t have any concrete plans to implement it yet.
      But if somebody steps up to do the necessary work, be my guest.

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