Sorry it took me a little bit more, but there's a literature contest, and is my biggest priority right now, and it's very time consuming.

Welcome to another issue of the Kontact series, this week we will give a look to Feeds part of Kontact, I used to use this application on KDE 3.5, and it seems like it didn't change much, but, don't misunderstand me, this isn't a bad thing, since Akregator probably have on of the simplest, powerful and easy to use interfaces all around KDE. Let's go on ;-)

Akregator

By default it looks like this:


Even, if the toolbar has many icons, the only one that can be removed (in it's current state) is the "What's this?" Icon. The browser part is useful when you're looking at the whole story, however, I'm not sure how much the user will actually browse using tabs inside Akregator. In fact, the best would be a dynamic toolbar, when you're at the main interface, they should dissapear, and when you're looking at a full story, they should appear (but it would be good if merged stop and reload), yet, the interface looks well (and not cluttered) anyway.

Akregator supports different view modes, all of them are quite good actually, with their strong point and minor weak points :-) On all views there's a little flaw, they show the feed source on the feed list, this is unnecessary, since you're looking at the feed source at the side bar ;-).

So I removed it for all the following screenshots but many seem confused, getting rid of it while viewing individual feeds, won't change the layout while looking at multiple feeds (all feeds or folders):


Normal View: The feed viewer is on the bottom while the feeds list is at the top. The flaw with this arrange, is that if the feed is a little bit long, you'll have to scroll a lot to look at the actual feed:

Widescreen view: This one gets pretty cluttered easily, however, if you plan on using the application maximized, it will be definitively the best view (however, I think that any interface that needs many space to work is flawed, and the kontact window default size is my reference):


Combined view: Will give the biggest space to look at the actual feed, however, you lose the list of the feeds, meaning more scrolling to actually know what's new and might interest you.


I personally believe the normal is the best one overall, and it's a pretty good default :-)

As I said in the first article, Kontact is a suite made of different application all combined by using KParts, this is great, and can be used by any application, Akregator makes a pretty good use of them. How's this? When you click to read the whole story, it will open inside Kontact, on a tab. This is great, of course, if you want to, you can open it on the browser too:


Disclaimer: I couldn't care less of a cat spinning... I just wanted a feed with youtube video.

Adding new feeds is very easy, you just click "Add new feed" and you're done:
Then you get a small dialog for tweaking the name of the feed, and other little things (like intervals), it's extremely well done, clean and easy. Kudos to the developers, Akregator interface is sooooo well done:


You can arrange them on folders:


Once again, search works as expected:

You can narrow your results easily:


The configuration dialogues are very clean and straight forward (self-explanatory), take a look:


Well, this is for today, I hope you like it, as you saw Akgregator is very nice, easy, uncluttered and functional.

Coming up next: Kontact: Journal*
Stay Tuned

*Unless somebody tells me about a good free usenet service, since I won't pay for something I find mostly useless (I apologize in advance to the usenet users), if you know about about one, please mail or leave comment here :-)

Welcome again. This is going to be a small overview, since the "To-Do" is in fact part of KOrganizer, which was mostly seen on the last article. It's just going be fast view at the main interface, the changes to the interface remain the same as on Calendar.

Kontact: To-Do

By default it looks like this:


Of course, after some little changes (removing douplicate functionality, like the. unreadble, mini to-do viewer, and the mostly unused resources), however, I need to remark that the calendar is absolutely useless on the To-Do (as it is the "today" toolbar icon) , but revoming it, will remove it too from the Calendar sections, this is a big bug in my humble opinion, it ends like this:


The interface works well, if you want to edit the fields, you can easily do it by right clicking them :-)


Little update (Thanks Thomas): I forgot about this, by clicking it once you can get an in-line editor, so you don't need to right click:

You can use flat view or tree view (I prefer the later, and it's the default), so you can easily see sub-to-dos:

Creating new To-Dos is extremely easy, just write a tittle and hit enter:

Little update (Thanks Thomas): You can easily add new sub-to-dos by selecting the desired parent to-do, then you just write the name in the in-line creator, but instead of hitting enter, you press Ctrl + Enter:
Being able to see the information without opening the editor is very confortable (at least after removing the mentioned parts at the beginning) :

Search works as expected:

You can filter categories (and it will affect search too):


Well, this is one was very short, but most was covered on the Calendar article, if you didn't read it, in that one you'll find the Add, configuration, attendees, categories dialogues among others. Thanks in advance for you attention, and I hope you like it, I will publish the "Feeds" article later today :-) (this is one was way too short).

Coming up later today: Kontact: Feeds

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