the (un)real thoughts of realbt

It’s nice to see that KDE Kontact is making some progress. I’ve checked out one of the snapshot releases but I haven’t had any luck compiling it on my system — I think because I’m only running KDE 3.1, not 3.1.1 — but who knows.

I already use KMail at home for e-mail, along with KAddressBook and KOrganizer (and KPilot and KNotes for Palm stuff). I had previously worked with Ximian Evolution for a while — but abandoned it for a number of reasons: I found it buggy, I was bored of the Outlook interface, and I prefer running apps on KDE that are built with QT rather than GTK/Gnome since they have more intuitive and standardised dialogues (though I suspect this has changed with Gnome2, but I’ve lost interest and I’ll probably not bother downloading the new Evolution).

Unfortunately, up until now, KMail, KOrganizer, etc., — the rest of the KDE PIM suite — were not terribly interoperable. That said, I should clarify that they were able to talk — but just as seperate entities. Kontact looks like it’s going to change everything — not only because of the integration of the KDE PIM suite — but also because of the up-and-coming development of Kolab — an open-source Exchange-like group-ware application.

So, from what seems like no where, there’s some really good potential to give Outlook and Exchange a new threat in the groupware market. I’m excited; are you?

I’ve always been skeptical of wireless networks — mainly for security reasons. I think this security breach basically confirms my concerns with the technology. People just don’t get it.

Please, don’t send me Microsoft Word attachments.

I think this is great. I run OpenOffice and KOffice (the latter is preferred, since it is smaller and runs faster), and neither do a very good job of opening Microsoft Office documents. There are a few commercial Office alternatives available for Linux: Hancom WorkDesk, TextMaker to name a few. I have tried one of the release candidates for TextMaker (a Word-only alternative) on Linux. It’s faster then OpenOffice, and seems to render Word docs slightly better — but it’s not something I would pay for.

So, anyway — back to the point. Please abandon Word. Or at least, don’t send me Word stuff unless you absolutely have no choice. I just wish OpenOffice would hurry up with development. I want something that will do versioning and track changes and such on Linux — that’s free. And I don’t think KOffice will ever get there, though OpenOffice will eventually — it just needs to get optimised to run faster.

BeOS. Do you remember BeOS? Probably not. Not many people do. It never really caught on very well, unfortunately. Be was sold to Palm, Inc sometime after the release of version 5, and since then it hasn’t gone anywhere. There have been some off-shoots - developers toying with the free Personal Edition made available based on version 5 sometime before the buy-out by Palm. Somehow, though, a company called yellowTab has managed to get their hands on the development source code for version 6 and they seem to be redeveloping it. With a desktop that is this pretty who needs MacOS X or KDE? Keep in mind, that the yellowTab/BeOS 6 screenshot above is basically what it looked like when I was playing around with BeOS 5 which was probably sometime in 1999. Take that XP. It’s slick, powerful, based on BSD, and does a helluva lot for a not-very-well-known desktop operating system. A full story about the yellowTab release is available here. Unfortunately, application support wasn’t huge when I was playing with it, and I’m a little too hooked on Linux now to run BeOS again. Still, though, it’s an amazing little operating system. If you think XP or OS X has rounded mouldings, plush carpet the relaxes even the most tired feet, a colour scheme that beats even Debbie Travis, and a slick intuitive UI, then you haven’t seen BeOS. No kidding.