Most applications currently have their support for actions on persons and their state, like email or chat, hardcoded. Using Khalkhi, applications can drop all their individual implementations and at the same time automatically get access to many more actions and states in a consistent manner, only limited by the installed service plugins.
The old Contacts framework was only used for the Contacts Kicker applet and the Contacts Card server. Now with the successor Khalkhi living in the same module as KAddressbook and other KDE-PIM applications, if only in the experimental branch, some more, obvious candidates for making use of Khalkhi are within reach. KAddressbook has already received its modification and is almost completely "khalkhified". It even got one or two new features, this week the status emblems for entries in the icon view.
[Image from http://frinring.wordpress.com/files/2007/02/iconview-with-status-emblems.png]
Before the other PIM applications are modified, we need to ensure that Khalkhi will be able to get into the KDE 3.5.7 release at all. There are at least two things to be done:
- getting a KDE4 version into trunk - there is some code in the works outside the repository, it is even enhanced with regard to the KDE 3 version, but right now stuck in a design problem that needs some thinking
- add configuration of service plugins - some services need to be configurable, for example the configuration of phone calls, fax sending and map lookups in KAddressbook. This is the last hurdle to make KAddressbook free of hardcoded services.
Note:
As some languages of the world are not too familiar with the sound 'χ': Just gently hiss like a cat to produce it. Or if you know the composer Bach, the 'ch' is pronounced the same way. Learnt something new today? :)