Meet KDE Now And The Future Of Email Push Notifications In KDE

For KDE Plasma users on the go, a new application may see the light of day sometime over the winter. For his GSoC project, Aditya Dev Sharma has worked diligently on an application called "KDE Now", which aims to provide an experience similar too "Google Now".


In this first iteration an email daemon was written and the backend developed to allow a user's reservation information to show on the desktop via a plasmoid frontend. In this initial phase, the application will scan emails (up to a month back) and show reservations in the plasmoid for hotels, travel, restaurants, and events. In the future, the backend will allow an easy way for developers to add support for other items as well.

KDE Now Plasmoid On The Desktop

Currently, the code is not in a completely releasable state, although it's close to it. The author states that work will continue on KDE Now in a few months. As to what remains to be finished before a release can be made, the author states

"Although we have a working, model but I still believe that KDE Now is far from release. I plan to continue working on the project after GSoC finishes. Below are some of the things I plan to do in no particular order before a possible release:

• Providing a front end for getting user details of multiple accounts. Currently we have front end support for entering just one email account and backend support for multiple user accounts.
• Writing Documentation
• Writing Unit Tests for everything
• Testing
• Changing the cards' background from current images to SVG's
• Getting a graphics designer to design said svg's

Apart from these, there are some other long term plans for the project:

• Integration with current KDE software. For eg. integration of Events with Calendar
• Integration with Sink (akonadi-next) when it is released."

Help is always welcome, of course, as the above needs to be done in order for a proper release. So, if you'd like to help out, head on over to the project's GSoC page over on KDE (link below), and see what you might want to assist with.

It's projects like this and others (KDE Connect, for example) that add just a little more "awesome sauce" to KDE Plasma, and make it all the more enjoyable for those users who are always on the go and need some general reminders to keep them on track. Once integration with Sink and Calendar happens, KDE Now will have even more appeal.

Thanks to the new developer making this unique application. Here's hoping that we get a release to play with soon. A video can be seen below that shows KDE Now in action.

Links:
GSoC/2016/StatusReports/AdityaDevSharma
#32: Google Summer of Code : Pencils Down