Planet Tine 2.0

Kontact mobile - new beta out for public testing

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 12:43:04 +0200

Kontact Mobile is developing very fast at the moment! Now we are happy to have reached the next beta-version that we really would like you to give us feedback on.

I would like to take the opportunity to say thank you to all of you that volunteered in our last diary survey. Your feedback was very valuable - keep the spirit up!

What do we have at the moment?

Kontact Mobile is running on Maemo on the N900. Soon there will also be a version for HTC Touch Pro 2.
It provides email, calendar, ToDos, addresses and notes. You can sync with a Kolab-Server and handle imap resources.
The application is technically stable (it relies on most parts on the code for the desktop, so it should be save to use it with real data - I do it too).
Most basic navigational issues from last test have improved a lot and we added lots of functionality to all of the applications (not-yet-implemented functionality is marked red)
On the downside: The application is still pretty slow, esp. during initialisation. Please be patient. Also there are some configuration dialogues that are still pretty ugly (if you find one, please report it to bugs.kde.org) and last but not least we are still missing mass-actions (e.g. move several mails). We are aware of this and promise to improve this further!

How can you help us?

Install the current unstable version to your N900 (find instructions on kontact-mobile userbase page)
Use it and take some note on what is good and what is not sooo good:)
Report technical bugs you find to bugs.kde.org - please ensure that you use the *-mobile products to file the bugs, so we can find and fix them
Report your experiences to our short survey - in there we will ask you about tasks you wanted to do, that went really good, ok, and where you failed (no diary this time!).

For discussion and support we have set up two mailing lists. For the more technical issues please join the Kontact Mobile list and for issues concerning the actual use, please join the Kontact Mobile Users list.

Kontact mobile - new beta out for public testing

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:41:32 +0200

Kontact Mobile is developing very fast at the moment! Now we are happy to have reached the next beta-version that we really would like you to give us feedback on.

I would like to take the opportunity to say thank you to all of you that volunteered in our last diary survey. Your feedback was very valuable - keep the spirit up!

What do we have at the moment?

Kontact Mobile is running on Maemo on the N900. Soon there will also be a version for HTC Touch Pro 2.
It provides email, calendar, ToDos, addresses and notes. You can sync with a Kolab-Server and handle imap resources.
The application is technically stable (it relies on most parts on the code for the desktop, so it should be save to use it with real data - I do it too).
Most basic navigational issues from last test have improved a lot and we added lots of functionality to all of the applications (not-yet-implemented functionality is marked red)
On the downside: The application is still pretty slow, esp. during initialisation. Please be patient. Also there are some configuration dialogues that are still pretty ugly (if you find one, please report it to bugs.kde.org) and last but not least we are still missing mass-actions (e.g. move several mails). We are aware of this and promise to improve this further!

How can you help us?

Install the current unstable version to your N900 (find instructions on kontact-mobile userbase page)
Use it and take some note on what is good and what is not sooo good:)
Report technical bugs you find to bugs.kde.org - please ensure that you use the *-mobile products to file the bugs, so we can find and fix them
Report your experiences to our short survey - in there we will ask you about tasks you wanted to do, that went really good, ok, and where you failed (no diary this time!).

When did you last keep a diary? Kontact Mobile is asking you to share your experience…

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:07:28 +0200

If you own a N900 phone and have tested or want to test Kontact Mobile it would be great if you participate in our current user survey- a diary.

Kontact Mobile has been under heavy development for the last weeks and however it is still at an early stage we encourage everybody to contribute and to become part of the process!

You can find all information concerning the testing in this mail:
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-mobile-users/2010-August/000027.html

You will do real pioneer work with reporting what you liked and didn’t like as well as your ideas on usability and interaction design. This will help the developer team to create a great user experience for Kontact Mobile in future. Help us to shape this great product!

Results of past Tine 2.0 User Surveys

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:31:33 +0200

With the new version - Mialena - of Tine 2.0 out, it is time to take a look back at the feedback you provided to us in the past version.

As you know we ask you - our users on the log-in screen to participate in short surveys. They all have one common goal: to assess your impression of the quality of Tine 2.0. So, how do you like Tine 2.0?

The overall impression of Tine 2.0 is good (about 2.4 on a scale from 1 (excellent) to 7 (needs improvements)). The rating of the individual applications varies with addressbook and calendar leading with approximately the same value as the Tine 2.0 overall impression. The other important applications (Tasks, Email, Admin) follow, getting good to above average ratings while still leaving some room for improvements. Only sales, phone and voipmanager get below average ratings.

So, with Mialena we decided to improve the basic concepts in Tine 2.0 further. Most application now have a proper filter- and favorites concept. We hope this will better your impression of most of the applications. We also decided to move the navigation from the Outlook-like-app-pile to a modern Tab-interface. I am curious how you like this! We also spent some love to calender, email and syncing (my N900 now works fine!) - and of course some more which you should not hesitate to find out!

For a lot improvements we did your free comments inspired us a lot. We believe that we managed to fulfill about 50% of the free suggestions you made in Mialena now. So thanks for that input and keep on going like this. It really hepls us a lot to get even better!

We also asked you a couple of other questions about your context of use (mainly business, but also for other private purposes, managing between 1 and 800 users) and the necessity for a handbook (about 40% would like one) or seminars (about 25% would like one). Even though we need to get better in documentation on our wiki and other resources (so you told us!), most of the users are quite satisfied with the documentation and help they can already get.

So, please check out Mialena and continue to participate in our surveys - and in any other way you like. We desperately seeking for designer wanting to contribute to the look and feel (esp. icons need to be done), volunteers working on documentation and in the forum - or how would you like to participate in the Tine 2.0 development?

Don’t forget: Open Source meets Usability on Berlin LinuxTag tomorrow

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:22:21 +0200

As a reminder for all who are interested in Usability and Open Source - and are at the LinuxTag tomorrow. We will have a very informal meeting from 9 to 12 am in Hall 7, 1a, Workshop Room “New York 2″.

You are very welcome to just drop in if you like!

Tine 2.0 Mialena (2010/03) released

nospam@example.com () — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:59:40 +0200

We did it! I just uploaded the first stable release of Tine 2.0 Mialena to our servers. About 2 months behind schedule, but we did it!

I really like the new user interface and it is very cool that I can read emails on my Motorola Milestone now. Just try it out yourself and download Tine 2.0.

Thanks to my team members here at Metaways and to all community contributors for their hard work! Tine 2.0 really rocks!

And thanks to my mom, my dad, to Sonja, Mialena, Lara and Ferike.

Kontact goes mobile - and you can help to make it feel great!

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:10:15 +0200

We are very happy to work together with KDAB, Intevation and G10Code on a project to make Kontact available on mobile phones. This is great as there is no really good mobile mail client around and as it is important for free software to offer such a crucial part of the mobile software infrastructure…

As always it is our task to make sure that the product in the end will be stunning and usable and as always we need your help to get there!

Now we are looking for people that are intersted in building up a testing and feedback community for this project. This community will be integrated into the further development and will help us by this to make the mobile version of Kontact rock!

It would be helpful if you own a N900, because there will be packages for this device available really soon - but there is no need to have one. We also look for people that will give us feedback on their personal needs and wants concerning the mobile use of a PIM suit.

What can you do next?

Subscribe to our mailing list
Visit Linuxtag in Berlin and take a look at what we got so far at the booth of the BSI (Halle 7.2b, Stand 215) or visit our small get-together on friday morning.

I will be around at Linuxtag as well - and will be happy to meet you!

Usability meets Open Source on Berlin LinuxTag

nospam@example.com (bbalazs osul) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:25:39 +0200

LinuxTag 2010, anybody?

We invite you to take part in an informal meeting to share thoughts, experiences and other information covering the topics Usability and User Experience in the Free Software world. The meeting is organized by Björn from OpenUsability.org and Christoph from the OpenOffice.org User Experience Team.

You should join if you are interested in:

Integrating User Centered Development into the development of your FOSS project
Wanting to add your UX expertize to a FOSS project
Wondering how to take benefits out of community work with real users
Some usability tips for your FOSS project
…

We are looking forward to see you at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany!

Go ahead and find more information on the Informal Meeting Wiki page.

Cheers,
Björn

How To Pronouce Tine 2.0

nospam@example.com () — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 20:26:43 +0200

As it’s becomeing a FAQ, here a small note, how to procounce “Tine 2.0“:

Tine two dot oh

For those of you who are curious what Tine 2.0 stands for, please find my post from 2007/12

If you still need some more input for the next nerd party, you can find the meaning of our version names here.

Webdav and Caldav proof of concept for Tine 2.0

nospam@example.com () — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:41:15 +0200

The next module we like to implement is a filemanager application. Such a filemanager application should also have Webdav interface. As you can mount Webdav shares with any operating system you can edit files directly, without needing to download them first and uploading them again after you finished the modifications.

Caldav is a protocol based on Webdav and enables you to share calendars with desktop clients like ICal, Sunbird, Lightning and Evolution. Also the IPhone supports Caldav.

One user posted a link in our forum to SabreDAV. SabreDAV is a very well written Webdav implementation which also supports Caldav. In the last few days I took my spare time and integrated SabreDAV with Tine 2.0. So far I'm able to access the contacts from the Tine 2.0 addressbook as vcards(webdav, using Windows Explorer and KDE's Dolphin) and integrated the SabreDAV calendar backend(Caldav with Thunderbird). This means that the part how to talk with the clients is solved.

Now we just need to implement the right backend classes and then we will have Webdav and Caldav access to our Tine 2.0 data. And we will also be able to access files stored in the (to be written) filemanager using Webdav.

Open Soure rules!

So far the code only exists on my local installation. As soon as the code can also run on different systems I'll commit the code to our svn.

Released Tine 2.0 Mialena (2010/03) milestone 2

nospam@example.com (admin) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:42:00 +0100

I just uploaded the new packages for Tine 2.0 Mialena milestone 2. You you can get them from your download page.

Be aware that this release is an unstable release. There are still some bugs open and if you use Tine 2.0 in a production environment please wait until we have released the stable packages for Tine 2.0 Mialena.

Improved userinterface

Cornelius spent much time, to implement the new look of Tine 2.0.

He spent most of his time to implement the tabbed user interface. Until this release all applications got started and switched with the buttons in the bottom left corner. Now starting an application and switching between applications got separated. If you only use 4 applications it will be much easier to switch between them,
as you will only see the 4 tabs for these applications. In the past it got confusing if you had to many applications activated and tried to switch between them.

Another new feature implemented by Cornelius is the reworked filter toolbar. The filter toolbar can be permanently collapsed now and also stores the selected folders. In the past there was a little bit magic involved, to which folders the filter got applied.

ActiveSync improvements

Based on the new filter logic, you can define now a filter to used for synchronisation with your mobile phone. Just save your filter settings and then you can apply the newly saved filter to to your mobile phone. Hint: Just try it only in the addressbook! The calendar still needs some love.
Sending emails from your mobil phone works now too. Synchronizing the emails is something I'm still working on.

Felamimail speed up

And Philipp also worked on an important part of Tine 2.0. The email client is now much more responsive. The folder cache gets updated in background, which gives you immediate access to your newest messages. Depending on the speed of your imapserver the older messages will be available after a short period.

That's all for today. Enjoy the new release and give us feedback in our forums.

Release schedule for Tine 2.0 Mialena (2010/03)

nospam@example.com () — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:21:09 +0100

On next Monday(22 March) we will release the second beta of Tine 2.0 Mialena.

The I will be alone for 2 weeks, as Cornelius is on vacation for 2 weeks and Philipp will be away for 3 months to be a good dad.

If everything goes well we will release the first release candidate until 9 April. The final release should be available one week later.

Impressions from the CLT 2010

nospam@example.com () — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:27:54 +0100

Superb organisation! Congrats to the whole Team of the “Chemnitzer Linux Tage”. CLT is definitely on the road of becoming THE german Linux community event. Tine 2.0 will be there again next year!

HTML 5 Multi + Drag and Drop File Uploads with ExtJS

nospam@example.com () — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:47:31 +0100

In anticipation of the new Tine 2.0 version Mialena which is scheduled for March 2010 I’d like to show you a sneak preview about the new file upload features.

Tine 2.0 is now able to upload multiple files at once. Additionally Files can be uploaded from directly out of the operating systems file manager or desktop using drag & drop.

Being an open source project, it’s extremely important for us to chose freely available standard technologies. Therefore it has to to be emphasized, that these new features run in FF, Chrome and Safari without any additional plugins.

The ExtJS wrappers for File Browsing are wrapped into
Ext.ux.file.BrowsePlugin

HTML 5 File uploading for ExtJS is wrapped into
Ext.ux.file.Uploader

New service release packages available for August

nospam@example.com (official news) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:00:00 +0100

This service release fixes some minor bugs. Have a look at the changelog to see which issues have been addressed.

We are at the moment working on the new mainscreen layout, implementing some calendar improvements and tuning the email client. A beta version of the next release should be available in two or three weeks.