liquidat has posted some notes on what was presented regarding KDE-PIM on LinuxTag 2008. As people started to ask about native look, let me add three more screeenies, all from May 2008.

First, the native KMail on XP with disconnected IMAP accounts:

Today the second generation of the Kolab groupware solution was released. It's incredible how far this project has come. I still remember when Martin Konold first told us about his ideas about "How to escape from the Outlook trap" at Linuxtag three years ago. We were sceptical, because it was all vaporware back then and the plans were, well, ambitious. But now with Kolab 2 we actually have a solid all Free Software groupware solution with full KDE client support through Kontact and even KDE as a project has begun to use it.

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Today, I finished two the new intro screen that was fairly overdue already. It's meant to look fancy and be useful (to a certain extend at least

In other news I finally committed the new exchange wizard with hopefully all relevant strings. I'll be working on it tomorrow to make sure to have something working for the final release. Right now it simply does nothing, so noone is gets hurt, just a bit disappointed maybe.

That said, Exchange is Groupware Server Number five that is going to be officially supported, although it still way to go until maturity. OpenGroupware.org is next I guess.

I'll send out a list with known and critical issue to the list tomorrow, I really need to investigate the reason for the toolbar mess in Kontact that happens semi-randomly. But now it's time for me to go bed, have a good night/day/whatever.

Kontact with its brandnew introduction screen.

When iChat was released and I saw the contact list with big face avatars I remembered inmediately that humans can recognize faces much faster than reading a name. Since that moment I wished that KDE could drop text everywhere it is not needed and start using faces (w/text as an addition if it makes sense).

We will have our second Kontact Bug Squashing Day on Sunday 25th July. As CVS is feature and message frozen for the 3.3 release we are all in bug-fixing mode and want to intensify our efforts to get a Kontact 1.0 which is as stable as possible. If you want to become part of this venture you can join us on IRC and help with reviewing bug reports, creating patches, testing fixes or generally cheering up the developers.

"Wow, Kontact is starting up much faster now" many of you might say after testing a recent CVS snapshot. While we of course are steadily improving speed, this perception of huge speedup is due to the delayed initialization trick: Kontact starts - the mainwindow almost instantly appears, showing the component icons. The splash screen remains, showing a progress bar, until everything is finished.

After Till kept bugging me, I finally asked David Vignoni to submit his final versions of the icons, which I then committed to CVS. As a result, Kontact has now finally decent icons. Interested people should take a look. Have a look:

Kontact with the new Icons by David Vignoni.