FOSSwire

A Personal Information Management (PIM) suite is supposedly a single application that gives you your email, contacts, calendar and other important information. Bringing Mail, Contacts, Calendar and more into one application is something that many find useful.

On the Linux and Unix platforms there are two main competitors in this space - Evolution 2.24.2, for the GNOME desktop and KDE's Kontact 4.1.3. I'm going to take a look at both programs, side-by-side and compare them.

Regardless of which desktop environment these applications are designed for (Evolution for GNOME and Kontact for KDE), which application is, for lack of a better word, 'better'?

In this two part series, I'm going to look at each app and focus on the interface, email (particularly searching and organising), calendaring (with a focus on sharing), and integration (both within the suites themselves and with the desktop outside of them).

First, to GNOME's Evolution.

Evolution

Interface

If you've ever used Microsoft Outlook before, the Evolution interface is perhaps more than just reminiscent. Throughout, Evolution heavily emulates the way Outlook operates, meaning that Outlook users should quickly find their feet in the client.

It feels well laid out; a sidebar to the left shows you your mailbox list in Mail, calendar list in Calendar etc. and to the bottom of the sidebar you can switch between the components - to go from Mail to Contacts for example. The right hand area is dedicated to whatever you're actually doing - the message list, for example, in Mail.

Email

Evolution has some powerful email search functionality. You can use the Search Box in the toolbar to search for a message, however this only searches the Subject and Sender of the message. Fine for many tasks, but not always enough.

There is also an Advanced Search feature available on the menu, however, that offers full text searching of messages. I found it to be powerful and fairly fast, even in a mailbox with tens of thousands of individual messages.

Finding that one message you're looking for quickly is an important feature of a mail client. Evolution largely gets this right. It could be easier to do a full text search, but provided you know where to look, you won't lose something for long.

Calendaring and Sharing

The Calendar module works well, again, being extremely similar to that of its Microsoft Office counterpart.

I had problems using the Google Calendar CalDAV support with Evolution. I think the fact that the username contained an '@' character was causing issues, so I was a little disappointed not to have that functionality. Importing an .ics iCalendar file worked fine, however.

Sharing events by attaching them as an .ics file to an email is quickly and easily done through the context menu. This worked well and I was able to share an event with myself on another calendar system. When you share an invite in this way, however, you rather curiously can't edit the message body - meaning you have to send a blank message. Rather irritating.

Integration

The integration within the components of Evolution itself is good. You can, as I mentioned, send a Calendar event directly via email, but also you can do things like highlight a snippet of text in an email and make a Task directly from the context menu. Little touches like that make Evolution a well integrated suite of PIM functionality.

Evolution also has very strong links with the GNOME desktop and other GNOME applications. For example, you can access your calendar events directly from the GNOME date/time widget in the panel and it supports syncing with your Pidgin IM contacts.

You also get a nice mail notification on receiving a new message that fits right in with the rest of the GNOME interface, appearing as a bubble in the notification area of the panel.

To Be Continued...

Join me in Part 2 tomorrow for my thoughts on Kontact in these areas and which application, in my opinion, is the best PIM on this platform.

Part 2 now published

Oh and by the way - a very Happy New Year from all at FOSSwire.com (yes, we're a little late to it)!

Apologies for the FOSSwire radio silence recently. I've been really really busy with university stuff. My Christmas break starts next week, so with any luck FOSSwire should get some more content over the festive period. Thanks for bearing with us!

The Amarok team have officially unveiled the 2.0 release of the popular open source music and media player application.

The world of digital music management has changed a great deal since the birth of Amarok four and a half years ago. Amarok 1 established a reputation for innovation, but maintaining development with the old framework became more difficult as Amarok grew, often in directions we never imagined.

Some of the things this new release brings to the table include:

• New user interface
• Integration with many online music services (Last.fm, Magnatune and others)
• New scripting API

Crucially, Amarok 2.0 is built against KDE 4, rather than KDE 3, making it an ideal music player for KDE 4-based desktops as it now runs natively.

There are also Beta versions of this 2.0 release available for other platforms as well - with Windows and Mac OS X versions available. The use of the Qt library underneath KDE means that the versions for these other systems integrate well (for example, Amarok 2.0 uses global menu bar when run under Mac OS X - so it 'feels like' any other Mac app).

I haven't yet had a chance to play with the new release, but you can read further release notes and download the 2.0 version from the Amarok site.

There are a couple of others (Konqueror, Epiphany), but the primary open source browser that you're likely to be using on Linux is Firefox.

Now don't get me wrong, Firefox is great for a lot of things. It is endlessly customisable and has ubiquitous support from website developers. It does have disadvantages too, however, including not exactly being the quickest beast out there.

WebKit is an open source browser engine (the code that does the heavy lifting inside your browser) that Apple made for its Safari browser. It is derived from the KHTML engine that was developed for Konqueror, but was reworked quite a bit by Apple and now various other third parties.

A lot of people prefer WebKit to Gecko (the engine behind Firefox). It's clean, fast and has a lot of different companies and organisations behind it. It's not just limited to Safari - it's in lots of mobile phone browsers, powers Google's Chrome browser and lots more.

Midori is a lightweight web browser for Linux built on top of WebKit. It doesn't have a load of features right now, but if you're looking for something that's quick, but has good compatibility with websites that don't play well in other alternative browsers like Konqueror, it's worth a look.

Despite some of its limitations, Midori does have built in support for User Scripts (which you might know as Greasemonkey), a bookmark manager, a customisable search box and a few other features.

It won't be suitable for everyone, however, or perhaps for all your browsing needs. I didn't find a way to run Flash inside, which might put some people off. Despite that, if you want a browser that's very quick and very light, even if you don't use it full-time, seriously take a look at Midori.

If you're running the latest Ubuntu version, Intrepid Ibex, you'll be able to install Midori by searching in Add/Remove Programs. Alternatively, still trying searching in your package manager, or you can get the source code.

[found via]