KDE 3.5.9 Brings New Enterprise PIM

Tuesday, 19 February 2008  |  Skuegler

The KDE community is happy to announce another update for the KDE 3 branch. KDE 3.5.9 is the latest bugfix and translation update for those who cannot or do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet. While currently no subsequent release for KDE 3 is planned, we will make sure to provide updates as they are needed to run your KDE3 smoothly also in the future.

The KDE-PIM enterprise branch that has enhanced functionality and stability in the PIM components KMail, KOrganizer, KAddressbook, KAlarm and of course its shell Kontact is merged back as official part into the KDE3 branch. Techbase has details about the changes in KDE-PIM. Among those are:

<ul>
    <li>
		A <em>Favourite</em> email folders view in KMail, as well as drag and drop
		support for folders
    </li>
    <li>
		Easier scheduling in KOrganizer through various improvements in the
		user interface
    </li>
    <li>
		Improvements in KAlarm and KAddressbook	
    </li>
</ul>

Enjoy KDE 3.5.9!

Comments:

Thank You - blendo - 2008-02-19

Thank you KDE Team for all your work. The new features of the KDE-PIM tools are very welcome. cheers blendo ------------ http://www.kde4.de

Very good things - m. - 2008-02-19

I am using svn version for last 2 weeks (prompted by Commit Digest) and they are really good improvements. Thanks. m.

Changelog - Pilaf - 2008-02-19

Is the changelog actually complete? I was expecting some fixes to kdelibs/kdebase. 3.5.8 introduced a rather subtle but annoying bug in Konqueror I was hoping this release would fix. No biggie anyway, I'll install it and cross my fingers. Keep up the great work, KDE team!

Re: Changelog - Carsten Niehaus - 2008-02-19

No, the ChangeLog is not complete at all. It is written by hand (well, in a XML file, the PHP/HTML is autogenerated from the XML). Most developers do not update the XML after each commit. There are many many more changes between 3.5.8 and 3.5.9.

Re: Changelog - moltonel - 2008-02-19

However, if the bug was fixed following a bugreport on bugs.kde.org, there is a very big chance that the bugtracker will be updated. By definition, if it's a subtle bug, it may not have been spotted by devs. When a bug is annoying you, do yourself and the community a favor by making sure it has been reported :)

Re: Changelog - Leo S - 2008-02-19

It would be nice for these maintenance updates to be able to see what changes went into them. If the devs don't have time to update the list, perhaps just a link to all commits between 3.5.8 and 3.5.9 would be an alternative? I assume this would be fairly simple to get..

Re: Changelog - teprrr - 2008-02-19

In http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/changelog3_5_8to3_5_9.php you can always click on "All SVN changes", which should return the full list of commits to that module. Apparently it doesn't work currently for this release though..

Re: Changelog - Carsten Niehaus - 2008-02-19

Hehe, it cannot work. Those "complete changelog" files have to be generated by a script as well. Nobody ran the script this time. If you want to help us here and improve the current situation (the is nobody feeling responsible for the ChangeLog) contact me, I will show you how things work.

Re: Changelog - Anon - 2008-02-20

I'm pretty sure nsplugin got some of the 4.0.1 fixes. So flash should work.

Re: Changelog - JRT - 2008-02-22

I tried it and Flash 9 still doesn't work in 3.5. Although it does work in 4.0

problems - sandsmark - 2008-02-19

I've had several problems with the enterprise patches, and the biggest is that sending mail doesn't work. It doesn't print any error messages anywhere, and when I installed "plain" KMail instead, the messages got sent right away.

Re: problems - jos poortvliet - 2008-02-20

Please send a detailed bugreport. Thanks to KDAB, the company behind much KDE-PIM work (and esp the enterprise branch) these should get picked up and fixed asap.

About PIM - Cypher - 2008-02-19

I'm just wondering if it wouldn't be better to have a monolitic Kontact instead of using different small applications. I find it weird to have different dock icons for each sub-application. Couldn't it be possible to integrate everything into one single app ? Moreover, having so many configuration dialogs is hard to manage. I know that this architecture provides the ability to only use the sub-components alone if needed, but for those who are looking for a professional centralized application (Outlook-like to be rude), it can be disturbing. Talking totally about something else, is it planned to integrate the Google Apps APIs into KDE-PIM ? It would be nice to support GCalendar out of the box for instance. Kind regards

Re: About PIM - Paul Eggleton - 2008-02-19

Wouldn't it be better to concentrate on improving the integration between the components within Kontact where needed? Surely this would be a lot less work than trying to roll all of the components into one huge monolithic application. Other than the configuration dialogs, where would you like to see more integration between the components?

Re: About PIM - Cypher - 2008-02-19

To be honest... I don't really know. Everytime I tried to launch Kontact, I got the KOrganizer and the... what was it again... the RSS aggregator... icons in the dock. Then I tried to configure the KMail part to get my GMail account through IMAP, and never found the option to root into a subdirectory (which is [Gmail] in the case of GMail)... Then gave up... Too many icons in the dock + blurry config + no easy GCalendar integration, I decided that Thunderbird + Lightning + GCalendar plugin was better suited to my needs, even if it doesn't integrate that well into my KDE. So I must say that I can't really be of great help. I was just suggesting a usability goal, based on the fact that I personally got lost because it didn't feel... erm... united enough. I would just say that a single tray icon, and stripped down unified config dialog with advanced options being just one click away would be great. Easy to use at first try, easy to tweak afterwards. My 2 cents...

Re: About PIM - Benjamin Schleinzer - 2008-02-20

If the icons annoy you ( they did annoy me as well) each application has an option to remove the icon from the tray. Voila you are left with no icon or the icon of kmail/korganizer/... or whatever icon you find most helpfull. This is actually a great way to customize the way the application presents itself to you. You need of course to go through the config dialogs for these applications but these are very well organized and you will find your way through if you are willing to spend a few minutes.

Re: About PIM - Cypher - 2008-02-20

Well... I need an all-in-one icon actually, because those icons are useful, but there are too many of them. No need to duplicate, only one for everything would be great.

Re: About PIM - jos poortvliet - 2008-02-20

I fully agree on the icon thing, I must say... Just one for all of contact, not several.

Re: About PIM - Anon - 2008-02-20

Complete disagreement, here - I want to see the number of unread RSS posts I have and the number of unread e-mails I have both at once, and you can't fit all of this info into one system tray icon.

Re: About PIM - Chani - 2008-02-21

which is why the system tray just... well.. sucks. it's an old concept and it's not working any more. what we *really* need in this case is a kontact plasmoid. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before one shows up; akonadi should make stuff like that extra-easy :)

Re: About PIM - Cypher - 2008-02-21

The difference between plasma and the systray is that the systray is always visible and docked into a panel with other "always on top" things. I don't want to access the plasma dashboard in order to click the icon. It should just be one click away, with no need to use the keyboard (I know, that's the current trend : use the keyboard more... just look at the new kmenu replacements. But I am lazy, and I don't like hitting my keyboard while I could just use my mouse. I spend most of my time just using a mouse, with my left hand holding a pen and taking notes. And that's the way I like it, I don't want to be forced to use both of my hands... Erm... sorry for the digression :) ) I guess that the systray is not dead and plasma is not the perfect solution to every problem (even if it is an amazing piece of work).

Re: About PIM - Anon - 2008-02-21

"The difference between plasma and the systray is that the systray is always visible and docked into a panel with other "always on top" things" Er ... you do know that the systray is actually a Plasmoid, don't you? There is absolutely no difference between a Plasmoid and something that can be "always visible and docked into a panel with other 'always on top' things". "I don't want to access the plasma dashboard in order to click the icon." You won't have to - just dock it in a Panel where you can always see it. "It should just be one click away, with no need to use the keyboard" See above :)

Re: About PIM - Cypher - 2008-02-21

Yes, right, I forgot about plasmoids in panels, my mistake :)

Re: About PIM - JRT - 2008-02-21

This is getting OT since this page is about 3.5, but: Widgets (KDE-4) could be much more useful if they could be assigned a hot spot at the edge of the screen that would move them to the top as with hidden panels in KDE-3.5.x

Re: About PIM - Thomas McGuire - 2008-02-20

Yes, an (optional) unified Kontact system tray icon is definitely needed. We already have a unified progress indicator, that shows it can be done (and also shows HOW it can be done). Hint: This would be a great junior job. The bug report for this is at https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75446 .

Google and KDE - T. J. Brumfield - 2008-02-20

I was thinking long and hard today along similar lines. KDE should form a strategic partnership with Google in much the same way Mozilla did. As far as the API goes, you only get so many uses for your API key, so KDE couldn't just take the API and use it without paying for it, or striking a deal. They'd go over API usage with all the people who use KDE. However, imagine Google contributing code to NEPOMUK and improving Strigi. Imagine fully integrating Google services like GCalendar, GTalk and Gmail into your desktop. Imagine easily integrating Google Docs to share documents. Imagine being able to search an index with your account, and have it know that what you're looking for is on another computer you've used recently. KDE 4 is now cross-platform. With plasmoids, open APIs, and the beginning of the Semantic Desktop, you could fully integrate your desktop experience with an online community, and simultaneously integrate online services into your desktop. The partnership would profit both parties, and the end users would get much better features. You could take it even further. It could create in-roads for KDE usage in the Enterprise environment through the strength of the Google brand. I can tell you first hand that integrating Sharepoint is very costly. Imagine an OSS alternative that allows the entire enterprise to communicate via email, calendar, IM, share documents, collaborate, search, etc. intuitively, and directly through your desktop apps. We need to brainstorm this, and someone needs to approach Google about this.

Re: Google and KDE - Kevin Kofler - 2008-02-20

Please, no! Please don't let them corrupt our Free Software by integrating their proprietary web applications, or even their proprietary desktop software (Google Desktop Search, Google Earth, Google Sky, ...) we already have viable Free alternatives (Strigi, Marble, KStars, ...) for in KDE! (I'm saying "our" rather than "your" because I happen to be a KDE developer (I'm the one to thank if you ever use Kompare in KDE 4, I got it from non-building to shippable in KDE 4.0.0).)

Re: Google and KDE - jos poortvliet - 2008-02-20

you got a point, but so does he. Working with Google has advantages and disadvantages - we can use money, resources and goodwill, but we don't want to be tied into them, offer google as only option. Luckily, it doesn't have to be that way - see the Magnatune integration in Amarok - it's now pluginbased - in part thanks to Magnatune contributions! Some companies really *get* FOSS, are genuine and willing to properly contribute to and work with us. Google has been doing well, so I think we could/should work a bit more - but not commit to ONLY google.

Re: Google and KDE - Kevin Kofler - 2008-02-20

Indeed, Magnatune paying an Amarok developer and even letting him implement support for competing music stores is very nice of them. Cooperations like this (with no lock-in involved) are beneficial to KDE.

Re: Google and KDE - Proprietary Taint - T. J. Brumfield - 2008-02-20

Google partners with Mozilla, offers money and code. They don't taint Mozilla with anything proprietary. They offer code and money to MySQL. They don't taint MySQL with anything proprietary. I suggested integrating open API's and such into the desktop. I suggested having Google aid Strigi and Nepomuk. Where exactly did I suggest we remove open code with proprietary code? And when did the GPL suddenly allow such a thing?

Re: Kompare - Erik - 2008-02-23

> I'm the one to thank if you ever use Kompare in KDE 4, I got it from non-building to shippable in KDE 4.0.0 Thank you for giving Kompare some attention. It semmd to be abandoned for so long! Like I was the only person left using it. And I use it a lot, mostly to review my own changes before committing to SVN (svn diff|kompare -&) and of course configuration file changes on Gentoo (set pager="kompare -" in /etc/etc-update.conf). Did you just port it or did you also fix some of the old bugs? 2 of the most annoying are that it does not understand directory structures (output of "diff -r", see [http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=139233]) and that pressing "Next file" jumps to a random file, not the next in the file list.

Re: Kompare - Kevin Kofler - 2008-03-03

I fixed some bugs (e.g. the character set issues), but I haven't looked at those yet.

Re: Google and KDE - Ian Monroe - 2008-02-20

Our technology by and large directly competes with Google. Trolltech/Nokia compete with the GPhone, KOffice is a competing Office suite, Strigi does the same thing as Google Desktop etc. Google does help us out (KDE 4 release event, tons of students for Google Summer of Code) I think mostly because creating a non-Microsoft software ecosystem is ultimately in their interest. And because we're cool. :)

Re: Google and KDE - T. J. Brumfield - 2008-02-20

Trolltech/Nokia does offering a competing product against Android, but that doesn't mean that Google would never partner with KDE. Google doesn't offer an offline Office suite, so there is zero competition there. Google does support ODF, just like KOffice, and Google would suddenly provide a means to easily share your documents online, and to allow collaboration. And I didn't think Google offered Desktop Search on Linux or Mac. Who knows? With a partnership, Strigi could effectively become the new Google Desktop search, except it would be FOSS, and it would strengthen the KDE brand. I don't know about the rest of the world, but in corporate America, FOSS is a dirty word, where as Google is highly respected. Such partnerships would increase visibility not only to individual desktop users, but also to enterprise environments. If Google had something against Strigi, KDE, KOffice, etc. would they spend money out of pocket sponsoring Summer of Code projects for them? As you already stated, they like to promote a non-Microsoft software environment, and they seem to respect KDE. In much the same way they assist MySQL and Mozilla, I think Google could help KDE.

Re: About PIM - Kevin - 2008-02-27

I do worry about Google, simply because it has become so large and expansive. That said, I do use Google's calendar (since it is the only way I can keep my workstation, laptop and Blackberry in sync) and GMail (which has a very annoying "feature" where you can only download mail once via POP). The GCal/kitchensync plug-in is broken (dies if you have recurring appointments, and who among us doesn't have weekly/monthly meeting scheduled as such) so it is a pain to sync w/ KDE Calendar (which is much more functional, at least this week). I do think, however, that collaboration with Google _and_ Yahoo! is in everyone's interest. Also, having a Blackberry sync mechanism for KDE PIM should be a super high priority. I suspect there are a lot more Blackberry users out there with similar problems.

weird - anon - 2008-02-19

new enterprise PIM? So bascally everything that has been avaible with opensuse for a few months, it's not really new then is it

Re: weird - jos poortvliet - 2008-02-20

Of course it's not new, Kubuntu, OpenSuse and others had it for a while - but now it's official in KDE, so slackware and other more vanilla distro's can and will ship it.

Re: weird - Sebastian Kuegler - 2008-02-20

Here's a secret: "Nothing that gets released under a Free Software development model is new, never!" :-)

Re: weird - Thomas McGuire - 2008-02-20

>new enterprise PIM? So bascally everything that has been avaible with opensuse for a few months, it's not really new then is it Not exactly the same. opensuse just shipped a several months old SVN snapshot, from a time were the enterprise branch still was very much in development. 3.5.9 has a feature-complete and more stable PIM than the old suse packages (and the same is true for the other distributions). Additionally, the enterprise branch didn't have any translations (except German), while 3.5.9 has all the usual translations.

Re: weird - Kevin Kofler - 2008-02-21

Fedora's snapshots got updated regularly. Moreover, we kept the original kde-i18n translations, so there were just a few untranslated messages for the strings added on the branch. But we have kdepim (and kde-i18n) 3.5.9 (plus 2 KMail bugfixes which didn't make the tagging cut) in updates-testing now, and will have it soon in updates, for both Fedora 7 and 8.

Oh Good - Rob Funk - 2008-02-19

I just upgraded my Kubuntu boxes last week and got KDE 3.5.8, which gave me at least two regressions -- a major kded bug (CPU-eater, though it seems to have bitten some people in earlier versions) and a minor (but damn annoying) konqueror bug (load-plugins-only-on-demand not working). Yes as I recall both of these are in the bug database. I can't wait to get the 3.5.9 update and see if these are fixed.

KDE-PIM and Facebook - Santa Claus - 2008-02-19

Speaking of KDE-PIM. These days, living in an Uni environment where most clubs, societies, and friends have their own facebook page and use it to schedule events, it would be really nice to have some Facebook integration in Kontact. I've heard about some akonadi facebook integration. Are those the first steps in that direction?

Re: KDE-PIM and Facebook - Mark - 2008-02-19

Would be really cool, but not only for facebook, also other social networks. Also an exportoption for Kadressbook to only export emailadresses for uploading them and searching for friends in social networks.

Re: KDE-PIM and Facebook - Santa Claus - 2008-02-20

Yeap, and speaking of email, checking messages from social networking websites would be useful too. We could have those social net sites listed as 'servers' in kmail.

+1 - Anonymous - 2008-02-20

That would be great actually. Also goes for other online messaging systems (e.g. forums/messageboards Inboxes). It's crazy generating extra "email" when it could be managed as like an (IMAPish) folder. Might be easier if a spec can be drawn up to manage this sort of stuff? Then sites/systems like this can expose some nice and simple APIs rather than rely on HTML parsing from the normal site's output.

Answerin myself... - Martin Fitzpatrick - 2008-02-20

I've looked around and found that: - there are no external APIs in phpbb - facebook API (notifications) is pretty simple XML affair - I could probably to construct a similar APIs in WordPress(easy) & Phpbb (it's been a while) So the 'hard bit' would be writing the code from within KDE - especially given I've not written a KDE app before. Does anyone with relevant Kontact/Kmail plugin experience have any words of wisdom about how to go about this? What's the current situation with the changeover to KDE4/new systems for data integration etc.? Ta.

Re: Answerin myself... - Kevin Krammer - 2008-02-21

As Will wrote further below, there is the beginning of a Facebook integration, including an Akonadi resource (the new KDE PIM data integration system) in http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/pim/kfacebook/

Re: Answerin myself... - Anon - 2008-02-22

Sweet. I'll take a look, thanks for the pointer.

Re: Answerin myself... - Mike Arthur - 2008-02-21

Support for posting journals to Wordpress and getting posts from it is already in Kontact for 4.1.

Re: KDE-PIM and Facebook - Will Stephenson - 2008-02-20

Yes, there's a kfacebook library in playground/pim and the start of an akonadi contacts resource there. However the Facebook apis are very limited - you can't create new events or edit anything, just view what is there. The last time I looked, even changing your status message was not possible. I'm more optimistic about the OpenSocial APIs.

Re: KDE-PIM and Facebook - Vide - 2008-02-20

Flock can change FB status via API, so I think it's definitely possible.

The best ever - Artem S. Tashkinov - 2008-02-20

KDE 3.5.9 still rocks! I will be using it at least before KDE 4.1.0 is out.

Re: The best ever - Jos Anders - 2008-02-21

Yes. I fully agree... 3.5.x is still way "better" than the lousy 4.0x. I dont think it will be 4.1 - rather 4.2 i expect og maybe Gnome if things dont improve.

Re: The best ever - Troy Unrau - 2008-02-22

Wow...

thank you - thankfull - 2008-02-20

"we will make sure to provide updates as they are needed to run your KDE3 smoothly also in the future." You guys rock. thank you for your work.

Imap improvements? - Joergen Ramskov - 2008-02-20

I've tried before to switch from Mozilla Thunderbird to Kontact/Kmail, but Kmails imap implementation work, just haven't worked for me. It seems it is time to try again after upgrading to KDE 3.5.9 :)

Re: Imap improvements? - Chani - 2008-02-21

people seem to recommend mailody for imap in kde. I've never tried it myself, though.

Re: Imap improvements? - Kevin Kofler - 2008-02-21

If you were using a non-enterprise kdepim before, you'll definitely notice some IMAP improvements in 3.5.9. Compared to the enterprise branch snapshots, it's mainly bugfixes (also depending on how old your snapshot was).

Re: Imap improvements? - Joergen Ramskov - 2008-02-22

Thanks, I haven't had the time to test it out yet, but I will get the time soon.

KDE rules the skies - love it - 2008-02-20

KDE is proof god never abandoned us, he just joined the KDE dev team.

Re: KDE rules the skies - JRT - 2008-02-21

It also seems to be proof that the devil exists.

do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet - YAC {Yet Another Critic} - 2008-02-21

I guess that I have a large disagreement about what the issue is here. I want to switch to KDE-4, but the KDE-4.0 BRANCH is still seriously broken and it appears that the bugs won't be fixed. We are back to the broken development model where bugs reported against the current 4.0.x release are considered fixed if they work in KDE-TRUNK, even if they specifically still exist in KDE-4.0 BRANCH.

Re: do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet - Kevin Kofler - 2008-02-21

We've had this rant in another thread already... Bugfixes are definitely being backported to the branch, if a developer isn't doing that, nag him/her (assuming it's really a bug, not a feature addition, unless it falls under a freeze exemption like Plasma).

Re: do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet - JRT - 2008-02-21

I think that you miss the point -- but then those that want to simply dismiss any criticism always miss the point. Dismissing a true statement because it has already been made in a different context is useless rhetoric. If bugs are closed as soon as "it works in TRUNK" who is going to even know that they still need to be fixed in the realease BRANCH? For that matter, how will we even know that the bug will still be "fixed" when the next release branch is tagged/released (such problems tend to reoccur). We shouldn't have to nag developers. They should take enough pride in their work to fix the bugs. Yes, some bug fixes are "backported" but that does not mean that all of them are. We naively presume that a release branch is more stable than the current TRUNK, but if the bugs are fixed in TRUNK and not in the release BRANCH, this isn't going to be true. If the release BRANCH isn't the place to, fix bugs, there is little use in having it. See bugs 153986 (a crash, which was marked FIXED when it is, at best, WORKS FOR ME) and 152243, which don't appear to have been backported (AFAIK, they weren't actually fixed).

Re: do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet - Kevin Kofler - 2008-02-22

I don't want to dismiss any criticism, only false criticism. I think there's some things which can be improved (for example IMHO the simple menu should be the default), but this process isn't it. > If bugs are closed as soon as "it works in TRUNK" who is going to even know > that they still need to be fixed in the realease BRANCH? Normally developers are supposed to backport the fixes as soon as possible, that way they won't forget. Sometimes, however, other stuff comes up and they just don't have the time, and then forget about it, in which case politely (!) reminding the developer is the right thing to do. And again, your proposed solution of fixing the bugs in the branch first is a very bad idea when you think long term because it means bugs already fixed in older releases can reappear in newer ones if the developer forgets to forward-port them. Both trunk-only and branch-only fixes are bad, but a branch-only fix is much worse in the longer term! Branch-only fix == regression. (And in fact, 3.5-branch-only fixes are one of the complaints I have about the way KDE 4 was developed: I had to forward-port 2 or 3 branch-only commits to Kompare, and that app got almost no commits recently, so I'm really worried about how frequent this problem is. So please don't say I'm here to dismiss all criticism.) > See bugs 153986 (a crash, which was marked FIXED when it is, at best, WORKS > FOR ME) and 152243, which don't appear to have been backported (AFAIK, they > weren't actually fixed). I've commented in those bugs. See: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153986 http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152243

Re: do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet - Troy Unrau - 2008-02-22

With 6 months releases in trunk, this shouldn't actually be a huge problem. I could understand if it was 5 years between releases that this would suck. Every KDE version ever released has had bugs. If we stopped to fix them all, we'd be in KDE 1.3.54 right now and would have never moved forward. /rant

Re: do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet - Kevin Kofler - 2008-02-22

But if all that's needed to fix the bug on the branch too is an svn merge and an svn commit, then I don't see a good reason not to do it. (And I'm a developer, so I know what I'm talking about.)

Merge of enterprise branch, features by Kolab-Team - Bernhard Reiter - 2008-02-21

For completeness: 3.5.9 has a bunch of merges from the KDEPIM enterprise35 branch, which will be continued of course. The work for the new features was done by the Kolab-Konsortium members KDAB and Intevation. A big THANK YOU goes to our customers which basicially finance this development! They make it possible to have a number of professionals work on KDEPIM.