Here’s the usual bi-monthly update from KDE’s personal information management applications team. Since the last report 30 people contributed more than 1000 code changes, ranging from work around the transition to KDE Frameworks 6 over signed and encrypted invitations to two GSoC projects.

Akademy

I'm going to Akademy 2023!

KDE Akademy starts next week! There will be a talk by Ingo about his work on accessibility of Kleopatra on Saturday 12:30, and we’ll have a PIM BoF on Thursday 10:00.

KDE Frameworks 6 transition

Work on the transition to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 continues at full steam, with the first release based on that still expected for later this year. Since the branching has been clean of all Qt 5 compatibility code and adapted to ongoing KDE Frameworks changes.

While there are still issues to be sorted out, in particular when running in a full Plasma 6 session, this is already in use as a daily driver for some people.

Kalendar

Carl reworked the models for the calendar views, which should solve multiple crashes. He also improved the retrieval of colors for events and calendars.

Claudio rewrote the mouse tracking for the popup in C++. This fixes an issue where the hover effects didn’t work in the contact view, making the code more performant.

Teague Millette fixed a bug where setting the reminder time didn’t work.

Vansh K added some settings for retrieving and publishing free busy information. He also added an option to send manually free busy information per email (blog post 1, blog post 2).

Screenshot of the new free busy settings.
Kalendar's free busy settings.

Aakarsh MJ added the initial stucture for composing emails in Kalendar (blog post).

Screenshot of the new email composer.
Kalendar's new email composer.

KOrganizer

Dan has finished an initial support for sending signed and encrypted calendar invitations from KOrganizer. When you create a new event with attendees in KOrganizer, depending on the organizer identity crypto preferences as well as crypto preferences of individual attendees, KOrganizer will cryptographically sign and/or encrypt the invitation email sent to attendees. This improvement is aligned with our vision of providing privacy by default.

Screenshot of KMail' message viewer showing a signed and encrypted invitation sent by KOrganizer.
KMail showing a signed and encrypted invitation sent by KOrganizer.

The UX side of this feature is not very polished yet and there’s more work needed in both KOrganizer and KMail to make handling signed and encrypted invitations more user-friendly. But as far as we know, Kontact is the only PIM suite that can send and receive signed and encrypted calendar invitations right now.

KMail

  • Fixed the problem that KMail reported “signed with unknown key” if a signing subkey was used to sign a message. (Bug 469304)
  • Fixed importing OpenPGP keys attached to an encrypted message. (Bug 469383)
  • Internally, KMail now uses the same code as Kleopatra for checking for certificates that are about to expire. (T6467)
  • Refactored the DKIM management to be reusable from QML.
  • Added a new mail notification history view, which can be useful for finding a recently received mail in a large set of unread folders with automatic filtering.
  • Fixed new mail notification settings.
  • Removing duplicate emails can now also be done recursively including all sub-folders.
  • Improved send later notifications.
Screenshot of KMail's new email notification history dialog.
KMail's new email notification history.

Kleopatra

  • Entries in the certificate drop-downs (T6492) and in the completion list of the certficate input field (T6514), that are used, for example, when signing or encrypting files or the notepad, are now sorted alphabetically.
  • Improved checking whether a file/folder is writable on Windows. (T6499)
  • When the user cancels a long running crypto operation (encryption, signing, decryption), then the background processes are stopped properly. (T6524)
  • Improved performance when encrypting or decrypting archives. (T5478)

Itinerary

Itinerary’s timeline was revamped, more entries became editable and new importing options where added. See its dedicated summary post for more details.

KDE Itinerary's main timline page showing a train ticket, hotel reservation and weather forecast.
KDE Itinerary's new timeline view.

KAlarm

  • Add a ‘show today’ control in the date picker. (Bug 470451)
  • Improve Defer dialog and provide dropdown for common delay intervals. (Bug 470451)

Help us make KDE PIM even better!

Take a look at some of the junior jobs that we have! They are simple, mostly programming tasks that don’t require any deep knowledge or understanding of the code, so anyone can work on them. Feel free to pick any task from the list and reach out to us by email, Matrix #kontact:kde.org or IRC #kontact:libera.chat! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your questions. Read more here…