Thursday, November 13, 2008

Opie datebook2

In Opie news I have been working hard on the datebook/calendar rewrite (aka datebook2). This was a project started some years ago but never finished, but if we are to have SQLite backend support for Opie PIM then it is essential, and it gives me the opportunity to add some more requested features and make the code a lot neater at the same time. Everybody wins!

The skeleton for datebook2 was already in place, and all of the data access classes in the Opie PIM libraries were there and about 98% complete. I must congratulate former Opie team members Stefan Eilers and Holger Freyther for their excellent work there - so far I have only had to make minor modifications to the Opie PIM API code in libopie2, and the original design of the datebook2 skeleton has worked very well as a base to build upon.

My aim is to make the interface almost exactly the same as the original datebook and thus a lot of code has been reused from there, with a fair bit of tidying up. The only remaining pieces from datebook1 not yet implemented are searching, beaming, keyboard shortcuts, a few other minor bits and pieces, and of course testing (!). Additional features on top of what datebook1 provided now include snoozing for alarms, and editing of location & description drop-down lists. I plan to try to improve multiple timezone support, and I may have a go at enabling the linking events together (aka irregular recurrence).

If you want any specific improvements to the datebook feel free to submit requests via the opie bug tracker or mailing list.

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