KOrganizer To-Do List

Group Scheduling allows to share calendar information with other users, for example by sending and receiving events per e-mail or by accessing a calendar server.

The architecture of KOrganizer has grown with the years. There are parts coming form the old KDE 0.x times and others, which are brand new. While some aspects of the internal architecture are just fine, others definitely need improvement. I favour an incremental process for such improvements. Always keep the program in a running state and refactor bit for bit.

It would be useful to have some kind of automatic testing, especially for the classes handling the calendar formats and files. Somobody willing to set up some test cases?

iCalendar is similar to the vCalendar format, but much more powerful, especially regarding group scheduling.
KOrganizer should be able to handle it. There are some other efforts going on to implement the iCalendar format.
If possible we should cooperate with these people. Related to iCalendar is also iTIP, the iCalendar
Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol. This will become the base for group scheduling.

There is no software without bugs. Those bugs, we are aware of, we will fix. The most important source of
bug reports is the KDE bug tracking system at <A HREF= http://bugs.kde.org >bugs.kde.org</A>.

An increasing number of people uses PDAs for personal information management. Support for
synchronizing KOrganizers with PDAs will extend the scope of KOrganizer from the desktop to the
field. Right now KOrganizer supports synchronisation with the Palm Pilot.

The holidays are read from files and processed by a yacc generated parser. The files have to be
converted to Unicode and the selection of holidays should be based on the country setting of the user.
The holiday managment of KOrganizer needs a major cleanup.

The basic functions for filtering of events are there. They need some more options and refinements, though.

Right now there exist three different event views to show appointments (AgendaView, MonthView,
ListView) and a view for the To-Do events. For all of them there is room for improvement. It would also
be desirable to have more views, for example a YearView.

KOrganizer can be run as KPart, for example within Konqueror. This is a new feature and has to be
elaborated.

Printing has to be revisited. The code is quite old and some newer developments like hierarchical todos aren t supported by the print functions.

The alarm functionaity needs more work. It currently isn't very well tested.

The KOrganizer documentation needs to be updated. There are new features to be described. Some frequently asked questions should also be covered by the documentation, e.g. My events are suddenly read-only. How can I access them now? , How do I sync my Palm calendar with KOrganizer? , How do I tell KOrganizer that the week starts on Sunday? , etc.

The journal view needs to be able to show more than one journal entry.

The new default calendar is CalendarResources which shows user-defined resources. Handling of this has to be improved.

Fix up the command line options of KOrganizer to do something useful.

HTML export needs more configuration options and some polishing.

The todos of KOrganizer contain all information required for simple project management functionality. What is missing is a more project-like view and the ability to share todo information with other users. The latter is addressed by the group scheduling features, the former could be addressed by a Gantt-widget.

When scheduling appointments for several people it is essential to have an overview of their free and busy times. iCalendar and the related standards provide facilities to get this overview in terms of data. What we need is a widget displaying this data in a convenient way. I would propose a TimeSpanView, which shows on a horizontal scale the available time of selected users. It should be zoomable and be able to show the timelines of many users in parallel.
<p>I have a concrete idea how this should look like and how it could be implemented. Please contact me <schumacher@kde.org>, if your are interested in implementing this widget.

There now actually is an implementation in the kroupware branch.

Sending events per email should be done by accessing the SMTP-kio-slave, maybe also supporting some more email-configurations.
<p>
For receiviing events per email,we need some kind of interface to mail clients. For KMail this can be done by some small application (a Perl script?), which is set as filter and transfers the mails containing calendaring information to KOrganizer (DCOP?).

The basics of the group scheduling framwork are already implemented. It supports iCalendar, iTIP and iMIP. The hard work is done by the libical library, which handles the format of the calendar data and requests. The KOrganizer classes, which handle group scheduling need more work, though.

Currently KOrganizer supports export of the calendar as HTML, vCalendar and iCalendar files. We need some common infrastructure for this task. The GUI should be unified in order to provide e.g. selection of a file name in a unified way. This involves some nice object-oriented design, shouldn t be too hard and will have quite some impact. The major goal of this design should be that it is easy to add new export modules. This will open new interesting options for interoperation with other systems (Would you like to give your colleague using Outlook a KOrganizer file, which he can import?).
<p>
Additional export formats are XML and CVS data.

We need some kind of common import support. It should provide things like file dialogs for selecting files and the hooks for loading and interpreting foreign calendar data. It should provide a way to easily add more import modules. This task is probably related to the export and format stuff.

There is a very basic DCOP interface, which allows to load, merge and save calendars. This has to be extended into something more usable. Applications are scripting, interoperation with KPilot, KMail or whatever. This is fun, because it is so easy and works so well. DCOP rules!

One important task is to get ready the DCOP interface for use in Kontact.

When an event is changed/added/deleted the views displaying it are undconditionally updated. This should be to be extended to allow more fine-grained notifications, so that only the widgets have to be updated which actually have changed.

Calendar data can be stored in different formats like vCalendar of iCalendar. There already exist classes that handle these two formats, but they could need some more work to make the interfaces more solid and extensible. It might also be worth to add some more formats like CSV data.

KOrganizer should support the iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP).

KOrganizer should support the iCalendar Message-Based Interoperability Protocol (iMIP), which is a
binding of iTIP to internet e-mail based transport. The main problem here is how KOrganizer gets incoming mail containing calendar information and how mail is sent by KOrganizer.

iCalendar defines a couple of properties for events and todos, which aren t implemented yet, e.g. location, resources, etc. These have to be incorprated into the event classes and the GUI has to be extended to cover them.

The KDE bug tracking system contains several bug reports for KOrganizer. These have all to be
checked, if the bugs are already fixed or if there is an action required.

Start viewer and press return -> dialog should close

There is the program KPilot for synchronizing with Palm Pilots and clones. KOrganizer has some
support for this kind of synchronizing, but it would be desirable to improve it. I don t know much about
the details, because I don t own a PDA.

This phone has an integrated modem and uses vCalendar format to store its calendar data. It should not be too hard to do synchronisation with this device.

Don t know much about this device. Can somebody provide some information about the format, the 9110 uses?

This is an slightly exotic device and its data transmission method using optical pulses emitted from the screen needs special treatment, which has nothing to do with KOrganizer. But it would be nice to transfer KOrganizer data to this device.

Use Unicode holiday files to ensure correct i18n for all countries. I don t know what really is necessary for this. It would be great, if someone how has an idea, what is needed, would take care of this problem.

There are multiple levels of holidays: Legal holidays, which mean that you don t have to work, holidays like holy evening, which mean that you might not have to work and days like discovery of America by Christoph Columbus, which are just informative. It would be nice, if the holiday engine of Korganizer would support these different kinds of holiday (or special days).

The use of lex and yacc seems to be overkill to me. Only a limited subset of information is used anyway. Holiday parsing could be much simpler.

Many applications can export CSV-type files. One example is Outlook. Implementing a flexible import module would open us new opportunities. This should use KImportDialog from libkdepim.

Create a new editor for journal entries.

The agenda view represents the day, and week views of a calendar.

Layout of month view might need a cleanup. Drag and Drop have to be implemented.

Define an interface for a calendaring KPart. This should define a framework for embedding KOrganizer or an alternative implementation into some kind of container app in the style of Outlook, Evolution, Magellan or whatever. Not sure, how difficult that is, but it s certainly am interesting and challenging task.

There are some unresolved problems, when accessing the config files of KOrganizer. They should be accesses in a way that works for both, when running stand-alone and when running as KPart. That currently does not work.

Should Korganizer be a read-only or a read/write KPart? Or should it be switchable? How? How are
file read and save menu items integrated in embedding application? There are a lot of questions. We
should find some answers.

Send an email as alarm notification.

E.g. raise an alarm the day before the birthday party to remind to buy a present and half an hour before as reminder to go.

An on-screen display type of alarm notification might be a nice non-intrusive way to display alarms.

Send a SMS as alarm notification. Use one of the free SMS services.

Sorting of todos just doesn t work satisfyingly at the moment.

Save the stae of sorting, of shown, hidden todos, etc. This might need some extra custom v/iCalendar components.

The GUI does not provide functions to order the todos in a ceratin user specified sequence. This has to be fixed.

Support the same way to move todos around as is used in KBookmarkEditor

Improve the views to provide some information about which resources incidences belonging to.

Currently KOrganizer shows all events in a half-hour grid. The resolution of the gris should be configurable by the user. Additionaly some problems with the restriction of events to be aligned with the grid should be eliminated.

We could show multiple time label strips for different time zones. Could be useful for some users and wouldn t be very hard to implement. Anybody volunteering?

The todo list could also be displayed as Gantt diagram. The todos have all the required data for this kind of view.
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We now have a Gantt widget, which already is integrated with KOrganizer. Jochen is working on the widget. It already works quite nice.