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Mixed Feelings
by Mystilleef on Saturday 28/Jun/2003, @09:23
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The integration of KMail, KAddressbook, KOrganizer and KNotes into one application,Kontact, has spiralled mixed feelings in me. On one hand, I commend the developers of this immense project for providing an application that will, undoubtedly, serve thousands of users; on the other hand, I cringe at how much of a resource hug Kontact will be on a frugal system. All things being equal, the larger your program is, the more system resources it consumes(in particular RAM), the more sluggish it becomes, and the more irresponsible and selfish it is to other applications and tools seeking the systems attention.
Microsoft Outlook, one of Kontacts competitors, is a clasic example of the message I'm trying to convey. I'd be disgusted if Kontact becomes a Microsoft Outlook clone. It is reduntantly bloated, ridiculously slow, irresponsible with respect to system resources and unpredictable courtesy of countless bugs. I hope a lot of fundamental planning, designing and thought has gone into this integration. I hope the codes are streamlined and efficient. And I hope to God, the developers were not inspired by Microsoft Outlook. No offense, but people should be imprisoned for writing programs like Microsoft Outlook. Yes, it sitll gives me nightmares.
I wish the developers the best and pray they make Kontack the ideal, model or standard, of how a groupware should be designed and implemented. And thank God for KDE's interprocess communication, via dcop, kparts and the likes, without it Kontact will indeed be a herculian undertaking I would shun a million miles away.
Regards,
Mystilleef |
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Re: Mixed Feelings
by Marc Mutz on Saturday 28/Jun/2003, @09:42
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> The integration of KMail, KAddressbook, KOrganizer and KNotes into one
> application,Kontact, has spiralled mixed feelings in me.
We're sorry. Hope you unwind again soon. ;-)
Marc
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
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Re: Mixed Feelings
by Mystilleef on Saturday 28/Jun/2003, @10:40
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Perhaps, after using Kontact my feelings will untwine, for better or for worse. :lol:
Regards,
Mystilleef
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Re: Mixed Feelings
by Datschge on Saturday 28/Jun/2003, @11:52
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I guess your worries are unjustified in this case. Kontact is mostly a shell combining a couple of existing mature KDE apps and tools for offering an Outlook alike PIM experience. The resulting usage of system resources shouldn't be much more than the sum of system resources used by the single apps embedded in Kontact (in particular KMail, KAddressbook, KOrganizer and KNotes). In case you can't run those single apps all *at the same time* on your computer due to the lack of system resources you'll neither be able to run Kontact.
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Re: Mixed Feelings
by Mystilleef on Saturday 28/Jun/2003, @12:32
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Hello Gents,
I have never at any point in time had the need to run all four applications at the same time, which is the underlying logic behind my rant. The important question is have you? I'm positive a significant number of users don't. And even if they do, it is should be on rare occassions. It doesn't make sense to run four programs as one when you don't need all of them running at once.
Furthermore, the issue is not whether or not my system can or cannot run KDE or any of its applications for that matter. My argument is that conglomerating a set of applications into one giant tool makes the application sluggish, larger and resource hungry. Basic coding dictates that small applications run faster and vice-versa. I acknowledge there other factors affecting the speed of a code. But, I'd hate to see KDE evolve into a bloated piece of junk called Microsoft Windows. Ever wondered why Microsoft Windows is so sluggish compared to KDE/*nix?
I'd hate the see the developers make the same mistake the Microsoft Outlook developers did. For this reason I don't see how my worries are unjustified.
Regards,
Mystilleef
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Re: Mixed Feelings
by Daniel Molkentin on Saturday 28/Jun/2003, @15:53
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> I have never at any point in time had the need to run all four applications at the same time
This expands to: "I have never really used a client-server groupware solution" :)
You need mails to communicate, a calendar to manage meetings (which you negotiate via email using the groupware solution). You need to put a bunch contacts somewhere, of which you can select some and say "I want to have a meeting with those guys". The groupware solution should try to find an optimal timeframe (and this is really just one usecase).
Conclusion: The whole concept only makes sense if the parts art tight and seamlessly integrated. The art is to keep the components stand-alone on demand, while achieving this high amount of integration.
This is not an easy goal and it will take time to get it right, but we are on the track and I think it's the right one.
Cheers,
Daniel
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Re: Mixed Feelings
by Datschge on Saturday 28/Jun/2003, @16:46
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Well, your worries are unjustified because you obviously have no interest in what Kontact offers. And Kontact won't replace KMail, KAddressbook, KOrganizer and KNotes but "only" rely on them for all features. If you don't want to use Kontact you are still free to use any of the four other apps, nothing changes in that regard. A high degree of shared code is what KDE excels at, code bloat always has been actively discouraged within this framework.
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Re: Mixed Feelings
by lit on Saturday 28/Jun/2003, @12:20
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You'll be able to use the individual tools, of course.
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