The next step: Coisceim

Using cloud services for your network and data gives away your control over your network and data. I read with interest about how Ars Techinca lost both temporarily, and told stories of how other people who don’t have the weight of a well known news website behind them to get it back. If you depend on cloud services for your network and data, they are not your network and data. You just have the privilege of being able to access them, which can be taken away for any or no reason. Usually the TOS of such services say as much. That doesn’t matter though as you didn’t read the TOS anyway.

Usually the main features of such services are access anywhere, aggregation, customized visualization and social features like uploading your picture and allowing everyone to consume your data. These are things which can be provided to some extent by locally installed applications too.

The new KDE PIM platform allows local aggregation of many different types of data. The aggregation is a feature in itself. As PIM data is part of the KDE PIM Platform, and not individual applications, this allows a departure from applications which focus on a single type of data or protocol (such as KMail -> email, KAddressBook ->contacts, KOrganizer -> events), to a focus on what the user is doing or trying to achieve.

In the old KDE PIM Platform applications owned the data and provided a scriptable access interface to it over D-Bus. In the new platform however, applications only provide a user interface to the data, and the data interface is provided by Akonadi. That makes the applications themselves far smaller, making it easy to split them up and create more purpose-built applications to fit with what the user wants. Newspeak centerward make easy newapplications indeed.

I’ve just pushed a new application as an example use of the KDE PIM Platform called coisceim, which is used for managing trips.

Using coisceim I can now associate a mail folder, calendar of todo items, and kjots book with an event, and track it as one semantic object, a trip. The video below shows the current UI (which obviously needs work 🙂 ) being used to create a trip, mark todo items as done, and edit notes.

(MP4 version)

Coiscéim, pronouced ‘Kush-came’, is an Irish word meaning footstep. I dropped the fada from the application name out of sympathy for those non-Gaelgoir gearheads.

Coisceim provides a single user interface for accessing mails, todo items and notes relevant to an event. In my day job I do some travel for consultancy and to deliver Qt trainings. The planning of such events usually includes emails back and forth about the content and time of the training and flight, car and hotel bookings. Alongside that, the training manager creates todo items which must be completed prior to the training such as printing the material, getting in touch with the customer etc. We handle those in KOrganizer (until now). Additionally, I need to make notes about who to contact when I arrive, the address of the hostel etc, and during the training I use notes to keep track of student queries so I can answer them the following day. A single focussed, coherent application for all of those aspects is intended to make this all easier to manage.

Interesting new user stories emerge with purpose-built applications on the new platform, such as being able to use a dedicated Plasma activity for planning a trip. In the video below I use a Plasma activity which is configured with a KJots plasmoid to edit a note which is already part of a trip planning. The plasmoid is used as a form of well organized clipboard in this case.

(MP4 version)

Because no application owns the data and there can be many applications capable of accessing the same data, editing the notes in one application updates them in all applications instantly. So when I edit the note in the KJots plasmoid, the note in coisceim is also updated.

Coisceim can also of course be embedded into Kontact, and there is a mobile variant using some components from the Kontact Touch suite.

(MP4 version)

In the KDE PIM community we have many ideas about other task-orientated applications we’d like to build, but we’d like to hear other ideas too. The ideas worked demonstrated at the last KDE PIM meeting like notetaker are also good examples of the kinds of directions we can go with PIM data visualization.

Writing coisceim, including the Kontact plugin and the mobile variant has taken a total of approximately 5 man-days. It is clearly not a complete application yet, but most people would appreciate that being able to turn an idea into a screencastable prototype in one week is certainly impressive and a credit to the platform. Further work on the application might involve making contacts part of the UI, using Nepomuk to automatically create associations of emails todos and notes to trips, make it prettier etc, but I don’t know if I’ll ever have time to do that. As a platform dude I’m more of an enabler really. I just made the app to show what the KDE PIM Platform is capable of, so if anyone else wants to take the reigns I’ll happily mentor.

What tasks do you do which cause you to switch between many PIM applications at the same time? What keeps you tied to the cloud (if you don’t like that :)) ?