Jan
24
Hacking Akonadi
January 24, 2012 | Leave a Comment
Personal information management (PIM) is the name of a category of software which provides access to a calendar, address book, e-mail, or note-taking service. Made popular largely by the Palm pilot, PIM allows users to organize their schedules and communicate more effectively with each other.
Akonadi is a proxy framework for PIM systems on the KDE desktop. A proxy framework connects different storage backends to PIM application frontends. This means that any Akonadi-enabled calendar program can access events stored on a smartphone, or in a file on the hard drive, or in the cloud (say on Google Calendar) without writing the same code twice. Similarly, to provide a new means of storing PIM information, a developer can simply write an Akonadi back-end and all the existing PIM applications will be able to use it to store events.
I recently created some software that integrates Akonadi calendar events into KDE’s office suite. This allows a user to create a document and attach it to a calendar event by clicking a “publish” button in the word processor and then filling out some information about the event (such as the start and end dates). The software has some missing features — it only enables the creation of new events, not the modification of existing ones.
I will be working with a student to address some of these drawbacks this semester. I will try to post updates on our progress here on this blog.