Kontacts: Calendar (KOrganizer)

Welcome to the third issue of the Kontact suit series. Today we'll give a look at the Calendar kpart (KOrganizer):

By default, it shares many interface problems with Contacts, they both show non-sense information by default, take a look:

Critics to the main interface first

The toolbar, I mean, come on, how many icons are there? Remember, for a sane interface try to never pass 7 toolbar icons, some application need to, but 99% of them don't. That your application supports copy, cut and paste doesn't mean it deserves a place on the toolbar!:


You see the arrow at the left? There's still one more:

The toobar could easily be reduced to seven icons, the most used seven icons, the rest of the views are still on the"view" menu, also, forward and backward button are useless, since there's a calendar:


The sidebar, is amazingly crowdy, full of non-sense, Akonadi resource is the first thing we should get rid of:

And, to be fair, we should get rid of the to-do viewer, since it's functionality is much better presented on the to-do list section of Kontact:

It's looking much better, isn't it? And it looks even better by reducing the size of the calendar, and increasing the size of the "content view":

A lot less cluttered, and we didn't lose anything per se.

End of critics

It has plenty of features, adding items is quite easy, you can either select a specific time using the mouse and then right clicking, or using the "New" dropdown menu of the toolbar, the dialog itself looks differently depending of what you select, for example, New to-do will confuse, and scare newbies, but then again, features are there, on the other hand, the new "event", even if it's very similar, doesn't look too cluttered :-)

New to-do dialog: As you can see it offers many features, priority and percentage of completeness, however, it isn't really showing much information, but it's using plenty of space to do it:

The recurrence dialog seems perfect to me, it doesn't look cluttered, and it's very well organized :-) You can select the recurrence type and rules to show them, the range of recurrence and the exception to the rules, all very well presented:

On truly good feature, around all Kontact, but which, for some reason I didn't show before, is that when you click any date, you get a calendar, so adding exceptions, dates, birthdays, events, etc. it's very easy and straight forward:

And you can easily add, and review, other members of the to-do:

You can also create templates if you usually work with certain groups of people :-). This way, you don't have to add them manually every single time, you just select the group (or template) and you're done:


New Event: Looks similar, less cluttered, yet still seems like using much space to show few things, but it's quite acceptable, it also has the "attendees" tab.

KOrganizer is quite powerful, you can easily create filters to make your search/review easier, you can select "filters" from the view menu entry:



Management of categories is a breeze too:

It also supports many other things, like sending as an iCalendar, vCalendar or as web page file, send an invitation to all the attendees of the selected event/to-do, as well as canceling the invitation, Mail free busy information, you can even import dates from the "Get How New Stuff" service:

Now, as always, to close, let's have a look at the configuration dialogs, and... I gotta say it, they're amazingly well done. Very well organized, uncluttered (except the colors in colors & fonts), easy to follow and understand, mostly 100% self-explanatory (congratulations to the KOrganizer devs, in this application it doesn't seem like an easy thing to do):


One thing I'm still wondering, is it wouldn't be better to just show the calendar (like iCal), in this, of course, this will mean we have to add the forward and backward button again, yet, it could work better (on the other hand, I like to preview things without opening the editor):


Probably this, even if less cluttered, would not be better even if the main editor is changed, and gives more priority to the content (that's reason I don't like to click in order to see the content).

Well, this is it for today. I hope you like it.
See you next time

Coming up next: Kontact: To-do List