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List:       kde-pim
Subject:    Re: - Project Status report -
From:       Stefan Taferner <taferner () salzburg ! co ! at>
Date:       1999-07-13 5:56:25
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On Tue, 13 Jul 1999, Mirko Sucker wrote:
[...]
> Stefan Taferner (possibly too busy).

Unfortunately most of the time, yes. I can give you a report on how my
house-building is coming along, but this will probably bore most :-)
 
>      -------- Addressbook UI ------------
[...]
> So, if you want a new GUI for the addressbook, simply create a new
> application and link it libkab (but see the notes on libkab below).

IMO it is not all that hard to write a GUI that looks like state of the
art and is useable for other apps. This includes at least some sort of
list of the addresses as default view.

Of course, we can have our own dialogs. But the goal is to have some
rather common dialogs for this task, isn't it?
 
>  How should the addressbook UI work ?
>  These are our options:
>  -------
> 
>  1. No UI.
> 
>  2. A UI that only accepts fields we decide upon. This would have
>  some tabs for entering common data plus a spreadsheet-like tab to 
>  edit less common fields. Don is currently working on this.
> 
>      3. A UI that is built from a specification and adaptable. This
> could be built from a KConfig file (Rik has some example code working 
> that produces a dialog identical to Netscape Messenger's). This might 
> be more tricky though...
> 
> 4. Do not fix the interface at all, simply declare the entry structure.
> Then you might have different UI's, like a tabular view, kab's "business card" 
> view, etc.

How about 3. with the option that the user can select which fields shall be
shown and which not. This field selection could be some simple checkbox list,
with every field having the option: "show in list", and "show in details".
Something like that...
 
>      -------
>      The UI SHOULD be used from every KDE base application to provide
> consistency.
> 
> This is not possibly and not useful. At least not if you fix the UI.
> Think of the person selector on korganizer, the address selection in kmail, ...

But still there are IMO many uses for some common dialogs.
E.g. some sort of quick lookup dialog which contains a list of names and
returns an addressbook entry.

> Would you like to see a tabular view all the time? 

Hmm... let's say most of the time. These cases that I don't want to see
it (as a programmer), I can make my own specialized dialogs.

>Something specialized
> would be great. The best way is to provide an api to use the common 
> addressbook, and provide one default database entry interface.

Yes.  But it has to be a bit more high sophisticated than the current
kab dialog (speaking of the one of around Kde-1.1).

[...]
> OK, now the most interesting part: What are the current design goals for
> a new kab?
[...]
> What has to be discussed is whether the DatabaseInterface class and the
> AddressBook::Entry class should be CORBA objects.
> 
> This is the way the kab library will mainly go. First steps have been
> done by Markus and me.

Any chance to use Qt instead of STL ?

The minimalistic GUI dialog and STL are the two things that stopped me from
using kab right from the beginning.

Kind regards,
Stefan

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