Here are some of the highlights of what happened around KDE’s personal information management applications in the past two months. Since the last report 23 people contributed about 1200 code changes, focusing on the KDE Gear 22.12 and the Gpg4win 4.1.0 releases and preparing for the transition to Qt 6.

Common Infrastructure

With the upcoming KF6 branching work on the Qt 6 transition of course continued.

Another significant set of changes relate to text input and assistance features found in the KMail composer. The goal here is to generalize and break this out into reusable libraries, to reduce duplication between different applications and for more application to benefit from this.

This includes:

  • Auto corrections as known from word processors, which fixes common typos or replaces typographic quotes, based on the same data as used by LibreOffice.
  • Grammar checking.
  • Machine translation to different languages, using online services and hopefully eventually also e.g. Mozilla’s offline translation data.
  • Text-to-speech output.

The most obvious one (spell checking) is missing from that list, as this is provided by KDE Frameworks since many years already.

KMail

  • Fix Kontact configuration not allowing to select the various components (bug 463390).
  • Fix identities with Cc: addresses resulting in a composer without To: field (bug 462492).
  • Removed information about the no longer available ShowUserAgent feature (bug 448348).
  • Fix random text appearing in KMail’s message list configuration settings (bug 459399).
  • Fix opening the detailed progress window not doing anything (bug 460289).

Kalendar

The settings and about page were ported to the new Kirigami Addons MobileForm. And the menubar is now more flexible and modular, so that each view now has its own menubar that will be displayed when the view is displayed.

Kalendar's new appearance and accounts settings pages.
Kalendar's new appearance and accounts settings pages.
  • Replace location field in incidence editor page with a combobox (bug 462166)
  • Don’t open link twice (bug 455791)
  • Use pixel perfect size for icons (bug 462175)
  • Show tooltip in IncidenceInfoContents for icons (bug 462174)
  • Fix final month dates in schedule view BUG:461200 (bug 461200)

We also fixed a few bugs:

  • Replace location field in incidence editor page with a combobox (bug 462166)
  • Don’t open link twice (bug 455791)
  • Use pixel perfect size for icons (bug 462175)
  • Show tooltip in IncidenceInfoContents for icons (bug 462174)
  • Fix final month dates in schedule view BUG:461200 (bug 461200)

Kleopatra

On 20 December, Gpg4win 4.1.0 including the brand-new GnuPG 2.4.0 and a current snapshot of Kleopatra was released for Windows. On the same day, GnuPG Desktop® based on the same sources was released as AppImage for Linux.

These releases include the following (usability) improvements and fixes that were made in the last two months:

  • The problem that a wrong user ID was sometimes preselected when certifying a single user ID of a key with invalid user IDs was fixed. (T6265)
  • Actions that require the secret key material can no longer be started if the secret key material is not available (e.g. because it is stored on a smart card). This prevents confusing errors when users tried to use those actions. (T6214)
  • The initial keylisting that is done on the start of Kleopatra does now suppress the potentially slow automatic key validity check. This prevents seemingly random slow starts of Kleopatra. (T6261)
  • The workflow for giving your own keys and the keys of other people the power to certify other keys was radically simplified. (T6148)
New much simplified grant certificate power dialog.
New much simplified grant certificate power dialog.
Previous complex grant certificate power dialog.
Previous certificate power dialog.
  • The workflow for moving a private key to a smart card was simplified by offering the deletion of the locally stored private key after copying a key to a smart card. Previously, this workflow involved the export of the public key, the deletion of the complete certificate and the re-import of the exported public key. (T5836)
  • Additionally, two bugs were fixed that could occur when copying a key to a smart card. (T6281), (T6287)
  • Invalid S/MIME certificates are no longer offered when encrypting something. (T6216)
  • The generation of an ECC key with curve Curve25519 on a smart card is now only offered if the smart card supports this curve. (T4429)
  • Kleopatra now supports newer NetKey smart cards additionally to NetKey v3 smart cards. (T6277)
  • The certificate import was improved by offering diagnostic output after the import (to better identify problems) (T6268), by skipping the optional certification process when importing own public keys (T6183), by reporting failed imports immediately when importing multiple files (T6302), and by supporting the import of UTF-16 (and UTF-32) encoded certificates (T6298).
  • When editing certificate groups the list of available certificates now only shows certificates that are not in the group. This makes it easier to spot certificates that are missing in the group (T6295).
  • On Windows, sometimes texts with international characters that were read from the backend processes were displayed incorrectly, e.g. the details of S/ MIME certificates. This problem was fixed. (T5960)
  • It’s no longer possible to start the certification process for expired keys. And canceling the certification process is now handled gracefully. (T6305)

Itinerary

Itinerary has been ported to the Kirigami MobileForms UI components and got initial support for the new European railway ticket barcode standard FCB as, as well as many other improvements. See its own summary blog post for more details.

Screenshot showing the bottom part of KDE Itinerary's train ticket page showing inline context actions.
Train ticket page with inline context actions and attached documents.

KAlarm

  • Fix daily alarms continually triggering just before end of daylight savings time (bug 461713).
  • Where possible, set a default command to invoke terminal to run command alarms in.
  • Fix handling of quoted path if configured for command to invoke terminal for command alarms.
  • Show error message if environment variables are set in command alarm command line.
  • In Preferences dialog, if a warning message is shown after OK is clicked, don’t close the dialog until the user has responded.
  • Use KAlarm’s default time zone to evaluate trigger times for working time alarms.
  • Update date picker display when a resource becomes disabled.

Help us make KDE PIM even better!

Take a look at some of the junior jobs that we have! They are simple, mostly programming tasks that don’t require any deep knowledge or understanding of the code, so anyone can work on them. Feel free to pick any task from the list and reach out to us by email, Matrix #kontact:kde.org or IRC #kontact:libera.chat! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your questions. Read more here…