2004.10_Kickpim-a Panel Applet for Quick Access to Your Address Book.pdf

LINUX USER

KTools

Quick Access

The Kicker applet KickPIM gives you direct access to your diary and address

book including the upcoming birthdays and anniversaries of your family and

friends. BY STEFANIE TEUFEL

N o matter whether you need quick

bunzip kickpim-0.5.3.tar.bz2

tar xvf kickpim-0.5.3. U

tar.bz2.tar

also set up the email monitoring feature.

Also, entries for KOrganizer and KAd-

dressBook give you direct access to both

these tools.

access to the KDE address book,

or a list of the upcoming birth-

days in the next days, the KickPIM applet

in the Panel will help you find important

addresses more quickly in future and

provide email shortcuts.

Besides a contacts overview, the applet

also has the ability to quickly and simply

mail the people on the list. To make sure

that you do not miss out on information,

this friendly helper also monitors your

email accounts and lets you know when

new messages arrive.

Before you launch into the install, feed

the directories that store any KDE soft-

ware on your system to the KDEDIRS

environment variable. The following

command did just that for our lab com-

puter:

As You Like It

When you select Settings in this menu, it

opens the preferences menu and the Dis-

play tab appears, allowing you to specify

general settings (see Figure 3). This is

where you can configure options such as

whether to display the user name and

current date when you open the KickPIM

window, and whether you want to dis-

play the calendar, and the

helpful tooltips.

Additionally, the developers

give you the option of choos-

ing between a number of lists

(email accounts, events, etc.).

The applet displays only your

selections and looks a lot more

organized for doing so. How-

ever, the default is to select

everything. You need to

remove checkmarks to disable

the components you do not

want.

export KDEDIRS=/opt/kde3:/usr U

/local/kde

Now change to the direc-

tory created by the

previous steps, kickpim-

0.5.3, and follow the

usual three steps, config-

ure; make; make install ,

to finish building the pro-

gram from the source

code.

The application is now

on your system, but not

sitting in the panel. To

create a permanent Kick-

PIM entry in the panel,

right click the panel, and select the Kick-

PIM entry below Add | Applet .

If everything works out correctly, you

should now have an icon with a clock

and a calendar sitting in your KDE kicker

panel. Left click the icon to pop up a

window with a little calendar like the

one shown in Figure 1. Don’t worry, by

the time we have finished configuring

the applet, the calendar will be full of

additional information.

Right clicking on the applet will open

the drop-down menu shown in Figure 2,

which gives you access to a variety of

settings. You can use the menu to config-

ure KickPIM to reflect your needs, and

Into the Panel

You can download this “big brother” for

your panel from the project homepage at

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.

php?group_id=65086&release_id=1957

56 . The current version is 0.5.3 and is

codenamed “Society”. This article will be

referring to version 0.5.3.

Type the following commands to

unpack the package:

Figure 2: The drop-down

menu gives you access to

the program configura-

tion.

Figure 1: KickPIM gives you a calendar by default.

Figure 3: If you do not need the calendar or

tooltips, simply disable them.

October 2004

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KickPIM

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to a specific period (see Figure 4). If

needed, the program can remind you of

really important dates. Use the Reminder

field to specify how many days in

advance of a birthday you want to be

reminded.

Figure 4: Remember those important dates, with

a little help from KickPIM.

The Postman Always Rings

Twice

As previously mentioned, KickPIM can

monitor your mailboxes for incoming

mail. To allow KickPIM to announce

incoming messages, you first need to

configure the email accounts that you

want KickPIM to monitor. To do this,

select Email Settings in the drop-down.

To set up a new email account to

check, click New Account in the Email

Accounts tab. This opens the dialog

shown in Figure 5, allowing you to set

up the account you want to monitor. Use

the pull-down menu to select from the

most popular mailbox types: POP3 ,

IMAP and Mbox.

To set up a POP3 account, use the win-

dow shown in Figure 6 to enter a name

for the account, and then

enter the POP3 server

address (typically your mail

provider’s mail server), the

username and password for

the server. The pull-down

menu at the top right-hand

corner of the window allows

you to enable (default) or

disable the account.

You also need to specify

the interval at which Kick-

PIM should check the server

that stores the account. If you need to

modify or even delete the account later,

simply click the Edit… or Delete button

in Figure 5.

The second tab Notification allows you

to define how the tool should react in

case of new email messages. You can opt

to pop up a message, play a sound clip,

or simply launch your mail program.

Figure 7: After completing the configuration,

KickPIM has a whole bunch of additional infor-

mation on display.

The Contacts tab is all about the

addressbook. You have options for dis-

playing the contacts from your KDE

addressbook, specifying the sorting

order, or what to do with an entry when

you double click it (send an email or edit

the contact), specifying whether to dis-

play cc lists, or allow multiple selections,

or if the applet should display a search

box.

The Events allow you to specify

whether KickPIM should display the

birthdays and anniversaries stored in

your addressbook. If you opt for this dis-

play variant, you can also specify an

unlimited display, or restrict the display

This completes the configuration of

KickPIM, and it’s time to put the tool to

some practical use. To do so, simply left

click the icon in the kicker panel. In

addition to the scenario shown in Figure

2, you should now have your KDE

addressbook contacts and a list of any

upcoming birthdays or other events on

the right.

The software also tells

you how many messages

are waiting for you. The

calendar is displayed bot-

tom right, with an input

field bottom left. This

input box is where you

can search your address

directory for specific con-

tacts (see Figure 7).

On mouse over, a short

text is displayed for each

of the entries, and you can double click

on the name entry in the left-hand panel

to display the full set of contact data (see

Figure 8, above). Right clicking on an

entry pops up a dialog with options for

editing, removing, or adding entries, and

you can use the same approach to mail

the selected contact, or add notes to an

entry.

Figure 8: Double click to dis-

play a full set of information

on the selected contact.

Figure 5: The window with the email preferences

is well-organized.

■

GLOSSARY

Figure 6: The applet provides a convenient dialog

for email account management.

IMAP : Short for Internet Message Access Pro-

tocol. This protocol allows users to access

messages stored on remote servers. IMAP is a

client/server protocol that receives email mes-

sages, and stores them for retrieval by a user.

The email client only gets to see the sender

details and the subject line of the message at

first, allowing the user to decide whether to

download the message on the basis of this

information. However, the client still man-

ages the messages on the server.

POP3 : Short for Post Office Protocol 3. In con-

trast to IMAP, POP3 is a fairly simple protocol

for email collection. Like IMAP, the server first

stores the messages. If the client then

requests the received messages, the server

transmits the whole message, deleting the

mail after receiving a signal.

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October 2004

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