Planet Tine 2.0 - developers

Participate: Tine 2.0 Milan user survey started

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 17:38:16 +0200

The Tine 2.0 development team announces the availability of a new online user benchmarking survey for the current Milan Release. All users are asked to participate and rate the quality of the current Tine 2.0 version. This feedback is important to direct the future development of Tine 2.0.Results will be presented on this blog. Especially [...]

Tine 2.0 removed qCal at GitHub

nospam@example.com () — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 10:16:52 +0200

I just removed the qCal library repo from the tine20 GitHub account. qCal is a small and clean iCal library we used for Imports and Exports. It’s originally hosted on code.google.com, but as the original maintainer just disappears we picked up maintenance of this lib about two years ago. With the new CalDAV features we [...]

Tine 2.0 CalDAV preview release available

nospam@example.com () — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:23:00 +0100

During the last 2 months we have reworked our existing CalDAV implementation. Up until now our CalDAV implementation was read only.

Starting with this preview release you can access the CalDAV interface read write now with following clients:
- Thunderbird Lightning
- Apple iCal
- iPhone
- iPad

As we have done this implementation for a customer, it is based on the latest stable release (Maischa). After we have finished this project we will port the code to the development version and will include the code with the next major release.

Now it's time to start the test drive. From my point of view the code is feature complete, but there might be some corner cases where we still have missed a bit. If you like to help testing you can grab the code from http://www.tine20.org/downloads/2011-05-5-CalDAV/tine20-allinone_2011-05-5-CalDAV.tar.bz2 and simply copy it over your current stable release.

After that you must include following rewrite rules in your Apache configuration:

# WebDAV / CalDAV / CardDAV
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^(GET|POST)$
RewriteRule ^/$ /index.php [E=WEBDAV:true,E=REDIRECT_WEBDAV:true,E=REMOTE_USER:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

RewriteRule ^/addressbooks /index.php [E=WEBDAV:true,E=REDIRECT_WEBDAV:true,E=REMOTE_USER:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]
RewriteRule ^/calendars /index.php [E=WEBDAV:true,E=REDIRECT_WEBDAV:true,E=REMOTE_USER:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]
RewriteRule ^/webdav /index.php [E=WEBDAV:true,E=REDIRECT_WEBDAV:true,E=REMOTE_USER:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]
RewriteRule ^/principals /index.php [E=WEBDAV:true,E=REDIRECT_WEBDAV:true,E=REMOTE_USER:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

Now you can point your browser to http://tine20install/calendars to get a list of calendar URL's. You need this URL to configure the calendar in Thunderbird. Apple iCal can be pointed to the hostname only, as it will discover the calendars available itself.

I'll prepare a wiki page the next days to add some more documentation.

Happy CalDAV testing!

LibreOffice user research ? Results vol.3

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 11:52:27 +0200

Today we discuss the results of our survey concerning the usage of the six LibreOffice applications. We also show how usage is related to other variables we talked about in the last posts (see volume 1 and volume 2). Writer is the tool which is used most often, followed by Calc. For us surprisingly infrequently [...]

LibreOffice user research ? Results vol.2

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:37:28 +0200

Today you can learn more about the psychological construct of motifs. We included them as variables in the LO survey similar to the independent variables introduced in our last post. The main results show that motifs security and prestige decline linear with age, asking users for a self-estimation relevance or expertize does not work out, [...]

Impressions of a usability guy on the Berlin Desktop Summit 2011

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:18:56 +0200

As Akademy / Desktop Summit was in Berlin this year, I took the chance to participate. I probably wouldn’t if it had been somewhere else – and I have to admit: It was a great decision to take part (and a big mistake not to do so in the years before). A big praise to [...]

Results of Tine 2.0 time tracking survey April 2011

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Wed, 04 May 2011 16:28:55 +0200

In April 2011 we ran a quick survey regarding time tracking in

Tine 2.0 moved to GIT

nospam@example.com () — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 11:25:07 +0100

The Tine 2.0 Project changes its Sourcecode-Management-System from Subversion to GIT. The main reasons for this change are the fast and reliable branching and merging capabilities of GIT. With this, the project hopes to reach an even higher level of development productivity. As all Contents from the old Subversion got migrated into the new GIT [...]

Designer vs. Developer? A FLOSS perspective.

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:42:54 +0100

The relationship of developers and designers is full of misunderstandings. Projects fail, e. g. due to the struggle among different views on the same subject. Communication can be frustrating for both sides. But there is hope. In this article I want to share and discuss factors that facilitate a ‘Designer with Developer’ rather than a [...]

Hello LibreOffice!

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:25:27 +0100

In long discussions with Christoph (who was one of the most active UX people in OpenOffice)

New Features in Calendar for Tine 2.0 Neele (2011-01)

nospam@example.com (admin) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 11:48:50 +0100

I just assembled a small video, describing the new feature which came in Tine 2.0Version Neele: Printing Color definition Fast responses to invitations Quick tip symbols Out of view hints

Final release schedule for Tine 2.0 Neele (2011/01)

nospam@example.com (admin) — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 17:43:46 +0100

Only 14 days left until we release the next major stable release. This week we will release RC 1, next week we will release RC 2 and if nothing goes wrong we will release the stable release on 19. January.

Please help us testing by installing the RC * releases.

Universal Design and Free Software

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 17:35:10 +0100

A couple of days ago I visited an expert´s forum concerning Universal Design:

“Universal Design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.” (Ronald L. Mace, 1988)

Thinking about this definition of Universal Design, I have two critical points to make: Who is meant by all people? And why is no need for adaptation a goal at all?

In the first place I regret the fact that the debate was dominated by speeches NOT referring to ALL people at all! Organized by the German Family Ministry it focused on generation fairness rather than the UNIVERSAL aspect of Universal Design.

By far the best contribution at this event was made by Peter Glaser – regarding him as an excellent speaker and a bright mind, I should pay more attention to him in future: He was about the only one there to understand that a UNIVERSAL claim cannot be limited to elderly or disabled people here in Germany or other first world countries – UNIVERSAL needs to imply ALL people on our planet.

If I understand the idea behind Universal Design correctly, I think it is one of the most important ideas around: Do not discriminate against any people anywhere in the world by means of technology, products or services.

But with my personal (free-) software-specific view on design I am puzzled about the rejection of adaptations in the definition by Ronald L. Mace.

I am convinced that the exact opposite is true. To me GOOD Design makes it extremely easy to adapt a product to the special needs of the user(s). This believe is one impulse behind my commitment for free software. The mechanisms of free software encourage people to derive special solutions for their needs on the basis of developed technology standards.

Some examples:

The GNU Linux kernel is an example for a good software design. Based on it there are heaps of derivatives for special needs.
The KDE desktop exists in a ‘normal’ and a ‘netbook’ variant – more hopefully to come.
There are many different variants of a single underlying GNU Linux distribution, e.g. Ubuntu, KUbuntu, Edubuntu, Mythbuntu, etc.
Kontact as a PIM-suite originally designed for the KDE desktop is being adapted to a mobile use-case in the ‘Kontact Touch’ project.

Do you have any other examples?

To sum it up: I believe free software is a good – if not the best – approach to achieve the noble goal of creating non-discriminating technology for all, or Universal Design. We are on a good path, even though it is still too complicated to actually do the needed adaptions today, especially if you are not a software-developer. We can still do better.

Shouldn`t we always keep that in our minds, when we create free software?

How to Speed up the Slow Zend_Date Class

nospam@example.com () — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:29:21 +0100

Is Zend_Date slow?

Well, it’s always easy to state that something is slow, so let me be a bit more precise: If you need to do a lot of complex date/time operations in you applications, Zend_Date might turn out to be the major bottleneck. If you just need localization for some date’s Zend_Date presumably won’t be your problem.

In the Calendar app of Tine 2.0 it turned out, that Zend_Date consumes 66% of the time of a Month view Request in a realistic szenario.

Just bashing Zend_Date would be to easy, as it has a remarkable feature set. Most notably in my view:
- solves the year 2038 problem on 32 bit systems
- full timezone support
- full localization support
- full support for ISO 8601 date string identifiers

As Date/Time is a really complex topic, here my full acknowledgement for this feature set at a time when PHP couldn’t help on all this.

On the other hand you don’t always need all the nice features it has, but you might want to use Zend_Date as generic date/time abstraction all over your applications. In this case Zend_Date is slow and has a lot of potential for improvements.

Patching Zend_Date

Zend_Date::__construct($date, $format, $locale)

Zend_Dates could be created from a date string in an arbitrary format and locale. This is great if you need to parse custom date strings.

When dealing with Zend_Date in backend operations, you normally only use very few date/time representation formats. e.g. ‘yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss’ which is the mysql date/time format.

For this kind of input Zend_Date has no optimization. An easy performance patch for this problem could be:

if ($format === 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss') {    $matches = array();    preg_match("/^(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})[T ]{1}(\d{2}):(\d{2}):(\d{2})/", $_ISO, $matches);    if (count($matches) == 7) {        list($match, $year, $month, $day, $hour, $minute, $second) = $matches;        // NOTE: PHP5 timestamp support is 32 bit and ends on 2038-01-19 03:14:07        if ($year < 2038) {           $date = mktime($hour, $minute, $second, $month, $day, $year);           $format = Zend_Date::TIMESTAMP       }    }}

Zend_Date::get($part, $locale)

When converting Zend_Dates to strings, the same as above applies. Here an easy patch could be:

if (! $part) {    $part = self::TIMESTAMP;}if (array_key_exists($part, self::$_dateMap)) {    $dt = new DateTime('@' . $this->getUnixTimestamp());    $dt->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone($this->getTimezone()));    $s = $dt->format(self::$_dateMap[$part]);    switch($part) {        case 'm':            $s = (int) preg_replace('/^0/', '', $s);            break;        }    return $s;}

with this dateMap

private static $_dateMap = array(    'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss' => 'Y-m-d H:i:s',    'MM' => 'm',    'm'  => 'i', // spechial handling required!    'M'  => 'n',    'd'  => 'j',    'h'  => 'g',    'H'  => 'G',    'HH' => 'H',    's'  => 's',    'I'  => 'I',    'z'  => 'T',    'U'  => 'U',    'eee' => 'N',    'D'  => 'z',    'e'  => 'w',    'X'  => 'Z');

Zend_Date_DateObject::setTimezone($zone)

As ZF requires PHP 5.2.4 and above, we can use native PHP functions to improve setTimezone:

public function setTimezone($zone = null){    try {        $dtz = new DateTimeZone($zone);        $this->_offset   = $dtz->getOffset(new DateTime('1970-02-01 00:00:00'));        $this->_timezone = $zone;    } catch (Exception $e) {        require_once 'Zend/Date/Exception.php';        throw new Zend_Date_Exception("timezone ($zone) is not a known timezone", $zone);    }    if (($zone == 'UTC') or ($zone == 'GMT')) {        $this->_dst = false;    } else {        $this->_dst = true;    }    return $this;}

This are just 3 very easy patches, but for a Tine 2.0 Calendar month view request it saves 41% of the request time!

Avoiding Zend_Date

Derick Rethans contributed a great DateTime class to PHP which is in included beginning with version 5.2 which got even more improved in version 5.3. This class solves the year 2038 problem, has full timezone support.

So my first idea was to write a new Zend_Date class which requires PHP version >= 5.3 to be used as a drop in replacement. Unfortunately it turned out, that the design of Zend_Date is not compatible with the DateTime, or to be more precise, the new class would also be slow due to two base restrictions in Zend_Date:
- ISO representation for date string identifiers
- Zend_Date also represents date intervals which have a separate class in PHP.

At the end I implemented on own wrapper class around DateTime which supports some old Zend_Date signatures, so that we don’t had to edit all our code. Zend_Date is only used when Server side locale handling is needed, like in exports.

Switching from Zend_Date to native DateTime brought us a speed up of 66% in a calendar month view request.

Wanted: Feedback on Kontact Mobile

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 18:34:01 +0100

We just have published a new version for Kontact Mobile on Maemo. I would like to encourage you to tell us how you like it.

Why should you try Kontact Mobile and give feedback?
Kontact Mobile is doing really well. It is a promising product, feature rich, free software, KDE and it is here to stay. But the current project of porting Kontact to the mobile world is – what it looks like now – only supported till the end of this year. So we really need your feedback now. Next year we will not have the same power as now to let your wishes go into the project. So, please try it right away, spread the word and do not forget to

take part in our survey!

Let us K(DE)onquer the mobile world.