After many months of “I will release it next week” I finally released libkgoogle 0.3 and new version of Akonadi resources for Google this week.
So, what’s new? I managed to implement everything I described in [this post]( {% post_url 2011-11-25-akonadi-google-resource-whats-comming %} “Akonadi Google Resource: what’s coming?”) back in November. That’s support for multiple Google accounts, and merging the tasks resource into the calendar resource (so now it’s called “Calendar and Tasks resource”). The calendar now properly supports events recurrence and partially exceptions in recurrent events (there’s still some work to be done). The contacts resource now splits your contacts to “My Contacts” and “Others” groups. I hoped to fully support contact groups, the code was even in place, but I’ve run to some problems how to store it in Akonadi and unfortunately KAddressBook is not “compatible” with the Google’s concept of contact groups, so I decided to stick with the two elementary groups and hopefully I’ll get to this later (maybe some PIM dev could help me on Akademy? ;) )
If you run to any problems or bugs, please report them to the libkgoogle product in bugzilla.
Finally, I’d like to thank to Jan Grulich and Vojtěch Zeisek for putting their contacts and events at risk to test the pre-release versions and provided valuable feedback.
Yesterday I have switched from Kopete to KDE Telepathy. At first I only wanted to see what’s new, but I was quite
impressed and I didn’t see any problem that would keep me from using KDE Telepathy instead of Kopete. Except for one - a
contact runner. I’m an incredibly lazy creature and instead of having to remember various shortcuts or even touching
mouse, I rather use KRunner for nearly everything, including starting chat with my IM contacts.
In the true spirit of open source, instead of whining about a missing feature I decided to take an action and write the
plugin myself :)
Same as with Kopete Contacts runner, just by typing name of your contact will display matching contacts in KRunner. If
you have one contact in multiple accounts, it will display the contact multiple times, with name of the account as well.
The results are sorted by presence, e.g. if a person is online on Jabber, but offline on GTalk, the Jabber contact will
be listed first.
If the contact has capabilities for audio or video call, file transfer or desktop sharing, you will see multiple
buttons. By default, just by hitting Enter on the selected contact will start text chat, but by clicking on one of the
buttons you can start the respective action. If the other side does not have some capability, it’s button will not be
displayed.
If you want to explicitly start for example an audio call, typing “audiocall John” will list all contacts named John
capable of audio call and clicking on it or hitting Enter will start an audio call immediately. Similarly there are
commands “videocall”, “sendfile” and “sharedesktop” for respective actions.
This last feature is untested though, because none of my contacts seem to use KDE Telepathy or have any capability other
than text chat :D
Here is some artificially made screen shot :)
(Ignore the KSnapshot icon, I had already removed all the code to generate this preview when I noticed it :D )
You can get sources from my scratch repo on KDE git:
I’ve made a big progress with the upcoming libkgoogle 0.3 last weekend on the Fedora KDE SIG meetings which took place
in Brno. I then decided to take some rest from all this Google things and wanted to relax by working on something else.
But then I remembered that some time ago I experimentally implemented the Google Reader API and…well, see for
yourself.
Originally I wanted to implement my own caching mechanism for the feeds, but I soon realized that I would be just
wasting my time when there already is something as cool as Akonadi.
I have written a simple Akonadi serializer for the data (took me about 20 minutes) and an Akonadi resource (that took me
about 40 minutes to write). Finally I begun to write the client.
The client itself is very simple, it essentially only fetches list of streams (for those unfamiliar with Google’s
terminology, stream == RSS feed) and their content from Google Reader and is able to update ‘read’ flag of one or more
items. You can’t add or remove streams (maybe later).
Note: Do not try to “mark all as read” if you have too many unread items. The resource is sending a HTTP request for
*every single item (will be fix later, maybe…).
But hey, what’s the difference between reading your feeds in a browser window or in a silly desktop client. To increase
the level of (my) awesomeness I’ve made a Kontact plugin as well:
Btw, does anyone know how to change order of the items in the left pane? I’d like to have the reader where Akregator
usually is :)
In the first sync, the resource fetches up to 200 latest items form each feed (I think that’s a reasonable amount), then
the updates are incremental. There is no progress indication, so just be patient.
In a way it is a “replacement” for Akregator (but it lacks almost all of its features :-), so actually it’s not…). I
suppose you don’t need to have local feeds in an RSS client when you can interact with feeds on Google Reader directly.
On the other hand, it’s not a serious project, more like a preview or demonstration of power and awesomeness of the KDE
technologies (it’s so simple to use Akonadi!) and all the people behind it. When libkgoogle 0.3 is out and stable, I’d
like to dedicate some time to help with the Akregator port (if it’s not finished until then), so this project will just
rot in git, forgotten.
As I said, this is more of a tech preview, definitely not something for daily use. I won’t be spending much time working
on it, but of course, feel free to clone the repo (see below) and contribute.
How do I get this?
You have to use libkgoogle from the experimental “reader” branch. This branch is rebased against the development
branch of what-will-become-0.3, so it’s completely incompatible with the current resources from master branch.
I recommend to install libkgoogle to some other prefix then /usr so that it does not conflict with the stable libkgoogle
library, but if you feel brave enough, you can try to compile the branch with calendar and contacts resource as well,
since they are mostly finished and working (and I would appreciate some feedback before releasing it).
Compile the Reader. The repository contains all the stuff - Akonadi serializer and resource, Kontact plugin,
KGoogleReader KPart and KDEGoogleReader application (sorry for the KDEGoogleReader vs. KGoogleReader inconsistency, I
couldn’t decide how to name it so I was mixing both names :) )
git clone git://gitorious.org/kgooglereader/kgooglereader.git
cd kgooglereader
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DLIBKGOOGLE_LIBRARY=/usr/local/lib/libkgoogle.so -DLIBKGOOGLE_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/local/include/
make
make install # as root
Remember to replace the path to libkgoogle by wherever you have installed it. Now you should have kdegooglereader
executable installed and when you restart Kontact you should see “Google Reader” in the left pane as well.
It’s been a while since my last blog about the Akonadi Google resources and since my last contribution to the project (except for a few minor bug fixes lately). Today I decided to change it (at least the former) and show you that the project is still active (I just don’t have much time to work on it) and reveal to you what big changes I plan to do in the near future.
There are two questions people are often asking me: if it is possible to support multiple Google accounts and why are calendars and tasks split to two resources. If you are one of those people, I have good news for you: next release will support multiple Google accounts and the Tasks resource will be merged to the Calendars resource.
Because words are plain, I will rather show you some pictures of how I imagine the resources could look like.
The first image is the new preferences dialog for Calendar resource. In the first list, there will be list of all accounts. The list will be common for all resources, so you will see the same accounts in the Contacts resource as well. Below is the list of calendars for the selected account (the list will auto-update itself when you choose another account + there will be something like “Reload” button to update the list by hand) with possibility to create, modify or remove existing calendars not just from Akonadi, but from Google server as well. The last list view is for task lists.
The second image shows how the calendar editor could look like. The are two things I want to change yet: replacing the wide color combo box by a single button which will popup another dialog with list of colors to pick from (according to docs Google supports only limited set of colors for calendars) and I’d like to have the timezone list displayed as a combobox instead of a tree view. The editor for task lists will look similar.
Regarding editor of accounts, clicking on “Create” will simply display the Google login page, same as it does now when you click on “Authenticate” in the resource preferences dialog. Given second thought, the “Edit” button does not make much sense since you can’t change anything (maybe just the name of the account), “Remove” will just revoke the authentication.
And finally, on the last image you can see how the list of calendars in KOrganizer could look like. Each account would have sublist of calendars and tasks lists. The image is very inaccurate (copy&paste in Gimp :)), only calendars you have selected in the “Calendars” list in the preferences dialog will be displayed in the list and there will be task lists displayed as well (again, only the task lists you choose in the preferences dialog).
So, do you like it? :) I don’t have much time now and collage exams are closing in, but I hope to find some time during Christmas and as I know myself I will be hacking this new features all January instead of learning for the exams :)
And just to list some improvements since last time: we now support categories for calendar events, information about contact group membership is synchronized (you can’t yet move contacts between Google’s contact lists, but at least the resource does not automatically remove your contacts from the lists) and some issues with timezones and daylight saving were fixed.
And finally (I almost forgot about this) some more good news, especially for Fedora users: I’ve created a project in OpenSUSE Build Service, so you can add a repository to yum to have access to fresh Akonadi Google resources :) I’m will rebuild the packages after every important git commit, so you will be still up-to-date.
Fell free to modify the .spec file to support other distributions as well, I don’t have much skills in packaging .specs for anything else but Fedora :)
And if you just want to build the project from sources, you can get them from akonadi-google repo in KDE git:
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/akonadi-google
As the title says, I just added support for Google Tasks by creating the Akonadi Google Tasks Resource. The Tasks API
provided by Google is really simple and does not support many properties, only name, summary, due to date, completed
date and status. You can’t set progress percentage, start date, attendees nor reminders (this sucks!). Despite the fact,
that the API provides means for tree-like structure of tasks (tasks and subtasks), it does not seem to work. So you can
only have a linear list of tasks. A positive thing is, that due to this limited functionality of Google Tasks the
resource has a full support of this API.
The reason for independent resource is that you can have multiple task lists in Google Calendar, thus merging this
functionality into Google Calendar Resource is not an option. Unfortunately, you will now have the tasks resources
displayed in the list of calendar resources in KOrganizer.
The second and very important update is, that we now have a product in KDE Bugzilla, so you don’t have to report bugs in
comments here. The product is “libkgoogle” so you can report bugs or whishes here:
https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=libkgoogle&format=guided.
If you think you have posted a request/report under an earlier blogpost and I still haven’t responded/fixed/implemented
your request, please report it again in the bugzilla.
today I finally pushed a completely new version of the Akonadi Google Resource. Since last update cca 2 months ago I’ve completely rewritten the resources, moving most of the functionality into libKGoogle. The library now provides access to Google services and can be easily used by any other project.
So what’s new? A lot of things changed for programmers. I’ve begun to fulfill my threats about providing a C++/Qt library for accessing Google Services. It’s not pure Qt, I’m using some KDE stuff in there, but that will change :)
LibKGoogle now provides API similar to QNetworkAccessManager (KGoogleAccessManager) through which you can send KGoogleRequest and if it works, you’ll receive a KGoogleReply. Each Google Service is represented by a KGoogleService subclass, implementing XML and/or JSON parser and serializer and providing informations about fetch/create/update URLs. Each object (contact, event, calendar) is represented by KGoogleObject subclass. For now, Event class is implements KCalCore::Event as well, the Calendar and Contact classes provide their own implementation of everything. Porting it to KABC/KCalCore is on TODO.
libKGoogle provides unified authentication framework and stores the tokens in KWallet. For now, you can only use one account per service (means that you can’t have two calendars from two different Google accounts), but this is on my TODO as well. The framework is also able to automatically refresh the tokens when they expire, so that should fix the problem with “resources forgeting the authentication”.
The API needs some more polishing and I must somehow force myself to write documentation, but the I think the libKGoogle can provide a solid base for any Google-related services.
The library is still in the same git repository with the Resources. I will try to move it to it’s own repo when it gets support for more services and the API will really stabilize.
From users’ point of view, there is just a very slight change in Contact Resource settings dialog. There are no new features in any resource. Though there are probably many new bugs :F So please try it out and don’t be afraid to spam me with any issue, idea, problem, comment, invitations to a beer etc…:)
With libKGoogle I hope more developers will begin to create Google-related applications for Qt and KDE. This library could one day be a good start-point for them.
Plans for future versions:
support more contacts and event properties
support multiple Google accounts per service
changing contact photos
tie KGoogleObjects to KCalCore and KABC
API cleanup
DOCUMENTATION :/
make the libkgoogle optionally KDE-independent (long-term plan)
It’s been more then two weeks since my last update about progress on Akonadi Google Resource, so here we go. Many bugs
in calendar were fixed, resource now supports creating and editing events and Contacts resource can fetch contact
photos.
So let’s start with the contacts. I’ve implemented fetching photos from Google Contacts, so now you can see all your
contacts smiling at you from your address book. Updating/removing photos is on to-do, but there are more important
things to be implemented/fixed first.
Now to calendar resource: you can now finally create and edit events from KOrganizer. I’ve also fixed some issues with
timezones, recurrence and reminders, so it really seems to work pretty good now. What has to be done are timezones in
recurrence. I’ve also implemented removing of events, but there seems to be some hidden problem somewhere, because
Akonadi refuses to invoke itemRemoved() signal, thus informing the resource, that event was removed and the resource
can’t send deletion request to Google Calendar….I hope I’ll get to look into this this week. Of course, if you feel
you can do something about it, just send patches ;)
Known bugs: except for the broken deleting of events there is a problem with authentication. Google only remembers the
last authentication token it has issued, so when you have two Calendar resources for example, Google will accept
requests only from the one you added as second. When you re-authenticate the first calendar, Google will forget access
token of the second calendar and vice versa. Using KWallet to store the access token would be probably the best way how
to share a single token among multiple resources and of course it would increase security a lot, but I need to learn how
to do it first :).
And finally, about future of this project…I was in contact with developer of the original Akonadi GData resource (now
called Akonadi GCalendar & Contacts
resources) and we agreed that it would be
nice to have a C++/Qt library for full support of GData API (including other services, not just calendars and contacts).
I will be slowly moving all the GData-related code from resources to a separate library. My idea is to provide a pure-Qt
library with optional KDE extensions (like conversion to KABC or KCalCore objects), which could be enabled during
build-time, so that the library could be KDE-(in)dependent, depending on developers’ needs. But this will be content of
an another blog post, maybe later when things will begin to move. Now is my priority to improve the resource, because
the Akonadi-related code is minimum compared to GData-related code which can be later dragged into the library.
So, that would be all for now, please test the resource and give me some feedback :)
so it’s been almost ten days since first version of Akonadi Google Resource and now here comes 0.2. This version
introduces Google Calendar Resource, so that you can finally access Google Calendar from comfortable interface of
KOrganizer.
UPDATE: Akonadi Google Resource is now in
KDE git repository!
As of now the resource supports read-only access to calendars, so you can just watch your busy schedule, but you still
have to update it in GMail. Some basic write support is the main goal for version 0.3.
A good news is, that the resource supports multiple calendars, so you can finally see all your calendars in KOrganizer,
not just the default one. You have to add a new resource for each calendar you want to access. In configuration dialog
you can then choose, which calendar you want to sync with.
The resource supports, except for the basic properties, multiple attendees, including their roles and types, recurrent
events (but without exceptions) and reminders (popup-dialog and email notification).
As I already said, in 0.3 I’d like to introduce read-write access to Google Calendar and add photo-fetching to the
Contacts resource.
If you want to give it a try, you can download 0.2 tarball fromhere, or you get the most recent sources from git:
My job as a Red Hat internet is development of Evolution, the groupware software. Although I’m using Gnome 3 and all the
Gtk stuff in work, I’m still loyal to KDE on my personal laptop. But one thing I really like on Evolution and I really
miss in KDE PIM is proper support for Google services. As result of this and after some talking with my flatmate, I
started to work on real, fullfeatured Akonadi Resource for Google Services.
At this moment, after about week of work I have working Contacts Resource. It can fetch, create, update and remove
contacts from Google server using their GData API. The implementation of GData protocol is far from complete, as of now
only few basic values are supported (name, emails, phones, addresses, notes).
Since this implementation is actually “working”, I’ve decided to release it as 0.1.
Version 0.2 should bring basic support for Google Calendar and most probably some major refactoring of libkgoogle.
Following releases will focus on improving support of GData protocol, including fetching of contacts photos. I have to
mention here, that the code is inspired by code of the great Akonadi Facebook
Resource, because this is my first
Akonadi-related code and I really need something to learn from :)
There are no screenshots worth posting at this moment, you rather try checking out the sources, maybe sending some
patches back, what do you say? ;) Sources are available in Gitorious:
http://www.gitorious.org/akonadi-google, clone URL is
git://gitorious.org/akonadi-google/akonadi-google.git.
Based on KDE 4.6 beta 1 release last week, I decidedI to test
the latest KDE snapshot 4.5.82 and here are the news I’ve found in there :) I haven’t been using development snapshots
I’m creating every week for ArchLinux regularily last few weeks,
since I’m mostly on Fedora now, so the changes are now more obvious for me.
First interesting thing I noticed already in KDM. In the list of available desktop environments, there’s no longer any
“KDE”, but it’s KDE Plasma Workspace!
The first thing after login I was going to test was the new, aesome and almighty Akonadi. Well - it’s cool, I really
like that. On the other hand, I think it’s quite slow on my 2x1.5GHz laptop. Loading 6k mails takes considerable amount
of time after the KMail starts. I hope this will get fixed soon or later (most probably later :).
Next think I checked was KAdressBook. I hoped there will be an Akonadi Resource for something like sync with GMail
contacts and calendar, but I haven’t find anything, so I will probably have to write something myself :)
Unfortunatelly, Akregator does not store feeds and their content in Akonadi database, which was something I hoped for
since I first heard about KDE PIM2 migrating to Akonadi. It’s not a great feature, not definetelly usefull for any
resource integrations (you really don’t need to access your feeds from other apps, unless you are writing something
better then Akregator), but I’d like to see all the PIM stuff stored in one DB, which would really simplify backups and
improve portability (when you are migrating between more PCs, possibility to simply take with you just one DB file would
be a nice feature).
A really great feature, a very appreciated one is the “Grid desktop” (Desktop Settings -> View -> Layout -> Grid
Desktop). When you are dragging an applet on you desktop, a grid is displayed allowing you to position the applet and
after you drop it, the applet is automatically aligned to grid.
When you move mouse to a screenedge, a bar with + and - buttons appears allowing you to change the density of the grid.
The new grid functionallity is further extended by applets groups. You can create widget which contains tabs. In each
tab there is a grid and you can put multiple applets into the grid. Another cool feature, don’t you think? I wish there
were more usefull applets like this, instead of something like KDE Observatory.
However I still found some issues with this applet, mostly when you try to insert a widget which is bigger then the
Group widget, it somehow overflows.
When we are talking about Plasma, I must mention Activities. It’s a very cool feature, but it’s not used a lot. Probably
because they still were unperfect, I personally for example really minded that the activities were all named like
Activity #1, Activity #2…now finally you can finally name your activities as you wish and they are more stable.
KDE 4.6 is also a great step toward HAL-less KDE. The PowerDevil has UPower backend now, but it’s not yet enabled by
default, HAL is still preferred, because it provides more features, but it’s possible to already use it for watching
battery/AC state and scaling CPU, but some features are slower then with HAL. UDisk was also implemented in 4.5.73
bringing support for mounting devices without HAL.
KDE 4.6 will be another great release in the KDE4 series, I’m happy to see KDE still evolving and moving towards modern
and fast desktop environment.
Czech version (not exact translation) can be found on my blog
on ABCLinuxu.cz.
