tucked away into a tiny corner

Saturday, March 08, 2008

I dream of Kontact

For the past couple of days, I have been considering some development ideas that have been percolating in my brain for some time. Mostly these ideas are the result of my fanboyism and a desire to combine two great tastes; KDE and Google. Well here are some of my silly dreams.
I have not been using Kontact for a couple of months, mostly because of the wonderful UI that is in Gmail, but I do use Kopete for my IM needs and Konversation for my IRC fun, both applications can link contacts to Kaddressbook. I am a bit of an addressbook nerd and really like having all the information on my peeps in one place, or at least syncronized across all the places. I have been using Plaxo.com to do most of this, and now that Google has released an API for their contacts , my hope that this will become more fluid. In fact, I am hoping that it becomes part of KAddressbook. Maybe that is an idea for a rainy day or two of coding.
I'd also like the Kalendar in Kontact to be able to write changes to Google Calendar, and while I am dreaming, I'd like the ToDo tasks to be synchronized with Remember The Milk with the ability to create new tasks from within Kontact that are saved into Kontact automatically. Why? Because Remember the Milk and Google Calendar have Twitter accounts which you can set to send you a text message on your phone as a reminder. Pretty handy way of not having to worry about syncing your data into your phone.
If you thought that was all the Google yummy goodness that I want to go with my pony, then you are wrong. There is a pretty nifty service from Google called Google Notebooks. There is already a Firefox plugin that allows you to cut and paste directly into the notebook from within your browser. Then you shuffle the clippings about, and export to Google Docs or into an ODF and you have a handy way to write a paper. Won't you know it, Google has provided an API for this service so I'm thinking, make this work across the KDE integrated desktop. If you are surfing in Konqueror and you want to save something, along with the link to the page it was one, make a context menu entry or even like the FF plugin does, and highlight the text and click the button that appears beneath the text and it is automatically inserted into your Google Notebook. But wait it goes even further, set up Basket to import and export your Google Notebooks, rearrange manage etc. Basket fits nicely into Kontact as a KPart.
I like having very little data on my laptop, it prevents me from ever worrying that my hard drive is not large enough, it also takes advantage of some of the better aspects of the web and if I want to leave my computer at home or work on another device, then I still have access the vast majority of my information. But not all my ideas for Kontact's fresh new face involve Google, this last one does not even involve the web, well it could be, that's not completely the whole idea. I have a touch screen and I keep a Journal that I write by hand in Xournal. Nice program, I even use it to create PDFs for calculus class. But my madness with big integration wants this function inside Kontact, so that well so that I can live completely inside Kontact (well as soon as Google releases an API for Reader and I share stories from within Akregator :P )
I realize that these ideas may only appeal to me, and that they are more than likely very impractical, but it's how I'd like to see the KDEPIM change. And if it could become themable to look like its a book with pages flipping and all that, well, illusions are fun to live in.

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