26 Apr 2009
Remember The Milk Plasmoid moved to kdereview
You may remember me blogging about the remember the milk plasmoid before. I’ve finally had more time to work on it, and yesterday (wow, it’s that late) I re-enabled the rest of the features that had gone missing in the last few weeks. This marks another milestone, the applet is now in kdereview.
Around the start of April I felt that it was in that ‘almost ready’ stage, so I went and took a second look at the choices I had made in the library and dataengine. Wow, it’s amazing how some decisions that seemed like fine solutions at the time turn out to be horrible hacks. I ended up rewriting a huge portion of the library to be more consistent and qt-like. This provoked a cascading effort to rewrite the dataengine to actually be useful and then the plasmoid to use the dataengine instead of bypassing it.
The rememberthemilk plasmoid has certainly changed since I started working on it in early January. It has transitioned through a number of stages, from concept to library to plasmoid to dataengine and then some. The data engine is a heavy user of complex sources, services and jobs. The plasmoid relies entirely on the dataengine, it doesn’t even link to the library. The library makes use of KDE technologies such as KIO and has a very kde like api.
Hopefully the plasmoid is just the start. I’ve already started on an experimental Akonadi resource, modeled after the wonderful Google Data resource. I’m also contemplating a KRunner plugin. Wouldn’t it be great to add tasks with “rtm newtask My New Task due Thursday” or similar? It could also support search queries.
Below is the first iteration of the plasmoid, and then its current state.
Next up… TimeVault. I’ve been letting it (and the ideas behind it) simmer for a while, but after my finals are finished in early May I want to get back into the thick of development. It’s about time, KDE needs an integrated backup solution 
Great job with the plasmoid!
I’m really looking forward to timevault project nicely integrated with kde.
Keep up the good work! Cheers!
Dread Knight
April 26th, 2009 at 4:21 ampermalink
Excellent, so that means that this won’t necessarily be tied to the rememberthemilk web service?
I have thought for a while that this looked like a really useful device but I was hesitant to tie my personal data in to yet another web service.
Would it be possible to keep a resource on a remote server of my own so that I could easily sync devices without relying on rtm.com?
maninalift
April 26th, 2009 at 5:00 ampermalink
Does this strange “Remember the Milk” name have anything to do with the applet? If not, please kill it and call the applet “Tasks List” or such. “Remember the Milk” confuses people.
If you want to stick with the name, still please remove it from the head line. It just looks plain silly.
Stefan Majewsky
April 26th, 2009 at 6:41 ampermalink
@Stefan
Yes, it does have everything to do with the applet. The applet is an interface to the http://rememberthemilk.com online todo service. I agree that I might want a slightly better name for it, but users do need to understand from the name/description that they need a remember the milk account.
@manialift
In theory and in some abstract sense it means that it’s not dependent on the service. However, the dataengine was built to mimic how conceptually rtm presents its information. This means that the likelyhood of it fitting with some other todo service is unlikely. Mainly this stems from the fact that rememberthemilk has a very rich implementation of what a Todo object is. The VTODO standard doesn’t (iirc) implment all of the features that rtm offers.
However, it shouldn’t be out of the question nor impossible to provide a different backend that stores things on a remote server via fish:/ or imap:/ for example. I don’t have the time for it now though.
astromme
April 26th, 2009 at 10:21 ampermalink
@mainialift
Actually, it sounds like what you’re really interested in is an Akonadi resource. I’m already working on it, and using that you wouldn’t be locked into rememberthemilk because (again iirc) Akonadi would let you get to your data in a universal way, which for now means VTODO.
It would be interesting to have a similar plasmoid that worked off of the akonadi side of things. That way it would be backend-independent.
astromme
April 26th, 2009 at 10:23 ampermalink
Wonderful. I am looking forward to it in 4.3. Time and task management are my big weakness…
However, I am even more excited about TimeVault. KDE really needs a good backup solution.
Keep up your great work!
mutlu
April 26th, 2009 at 10:25 ampermalink
AWESOME! I have been waiting for this, truly will be my #1 plasmoid, actually the only plasmoid that I use
Great job!
nixternal
April 26th, 2009 at 11:20 ampermalink
I’m using this plasmoid compiled from sources and I find it very, very useful. Thank you!
PD: Which font are yu using for your KDE Desktop?
gskbyte
April 27th, 2009 at 8:33 ampermalink
@gskbyte
I’m glad you’re enjoying it
I’m currently using Segoe UI, which (unfortunately) is from Microsoft Office 2007. You’ll either need a license to that product or you’ll have to find it by more… questionable… means.
I’m using font AA, but no sub pixel hinting/rendering (they cause weird font problems for me here on Arch Linux and Qt 4.5)
astromme
April 27th, 2009 at 10:46 ampermalink
Hi, I’m trying to install this from SVN and I get a package collision between rtm-dataengine and kdebase-workspace, specifically on the file
/usr/share/apps/plasma/services/tasks.operations
Pablo
April 29th, 2009 at 9:34 pmpermalink
Hmm, looks like the tasks plasmoid (which, semi-confusingly, isn’t about todos but is about the active windows/programs) has it’s own tasks.operations. I committed a fix in rev 961384. Thanks for the heads up!
astromme
April 30th, 2009 at 12:29 ampermalink
Cool, thanks. It works fine now. I sent an update to Arch’s AUR. Hopefully, the package owner will adopt the update.
Pablo
April 30th, 2009 at 10:01 ampermalink
I would have been using it, but I encountered the problem described here http://chakra-project.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?id=1446 . Do you know how to solve it?
Maciek
February 13th, 2010 at 4:40 pmpermalink
Hi dude,
I’m trying to use the RTM plasmoid but all I get is a blank page when trying to auth the plasmoid. Is it a known bug or am I doing something wrong here?
Thanks a lot!
Abner Silva
May 14th, 2010 at 6:00 pmpermalink
@Abner
I’m pretty sure you have run into a known bug. I’ve fixed it for the next 4.4.x release as well as 4.5. If you know how, try running the svn checkout for branch 4.4 and see if that works. (you should only have to build kdeplasma-addons/libs/rtm)
astromme
May 23rd, 2010 at 9:54 pmpermalink
Hi! Thanks for writing this plasmoid, I just got it through Kubuntu 10.04! Very pretty, and it works great, except for one thing: I don’t understand what makes it synchronize with the server, neither pulling nor pushing. It seems like certain events makes it do it, but I don’t understand when it does, and I don’t see any “synchronize now” so that I can make sure I have the latest from the server. How do I do this?
Kjetil Kjernsmo
June 2nd, 2010 at 4:45 pmpermalink
Is any work still being done on the RTM Akonadi resource? I’d really like to have a synchronized to-do list across my two KDE installs.
Where can I find the backend to play with it?
Patrick
September 1st, 2010 at 10:33 pmpermalink