KDEPIM on Mobile – What’s going on?

Anyone following the commits in the kde svn repo will notice that there has been some action on the mobile front in KDE PIM over the last few months.

We reported from our annual meeting in Osnabrück that we would be working to get a PIM stack based on KDE and Akonadi onto Maemo and WinCE devices with the benefits and features that Kontact and the rest of KDEPIM brings desktop users today in stable versions of KDE PIM.

The target is a suite of Free Software PIM applications enabling strong encryption and privacy features along with separation of data to different contexts, for example work and home email and contacts. The solution must be flexible to multiple access and transfer protocols, and to multiple types of data as well as being realistically fast. The framework for the PIM platform is of course provided by Akonadi.

This project is the result of a collaboration of KDAB, (my employer) with Intevation, crypto specialists G10Code, and interaction specialists Apliki known to KDE for recent usability testing work on KMail icons.

Recently a milestone of readonly functionality prototypes was reached for all target applications, so I can start to show them off. It is important to keep in mind that visual completeness was not a target up to now, so all applications will likely change visually as we work towards finished software.

[OGG link]

In this video I use and kmail-mobile, kaddressbook-mobile, korganizer-mobile to access data on a remote Kolab server, the same that my desktop connects to. Much of the UI layer is implemented in QML, and the gestures support allows the use of swipe actions to for example expand slider panels on the side, flick through lists and go to next and previous items. The screenshots below are from my workstation which has different proportions to the phone, but shows the functionality more clearly if you can’t hold it in your hand.

KMail-mobile provides a navigation tree on the left and a list of emails on the right.

When a collection is selected, its child collections are show below it. The "current" email shows some more information

Selecting an email makes it readable in fullscreen mode.

All of the applications feature a start page to select an account or configure favorites

KAddressbook-mobile uses a similar account navigation method to KMail-mobile

The expanded view shows the same information as the current KAddressBook

KOrganizer-mobile features an agenda view as the central component

The event detail view is shared with KOrganizer

The start page of KOrganizer-mobile also allows chosing a date-range to browse

The KDE PIM platform provides a large versatile base for pim applications of different form factors

Much of the code implementing the mobile application functionality is shared with the desktop versions of the applications. We estimated before that it should be possible to share up to 80% of the code between them. Of course, should does not mean *will*, but sometimes it can. 🙂