Once in a while we come across rumors, urban ledgends and myths about all kinds of things.

For example you might have read, heard or otherwise encountered wild claims about Akonadi's dependencies, maybe even as ridiculous as "depends on KDE".

Don't get me wrong, I don't have the slightest problem with stuff depending on KDE, but one of Akonadi's goals is to be a viable option for all PIM applications and a dependency on KDE would make that quite hard.

The past month had quite some cool things in store.

It started with the Akonadi developer sprint in Berlin, Germany, where we got quite some work done, especially regarding mails.

This was followed by the general ranking period for this year's Google Summer of Code proposals and we were delighted to see that the Akonadi related ones did exceptionally well.

In case you thought that reading about the Akonadi developer sprint on the dot gave you an all encompassing overview of stuff happening around Akonadi, you forgot our brazilian friends.

Adenilson Cavalcanti, also featured in one of Danny's excellent commit digests, has been working like a mad man (or a genious, thin line and all that ;-) ) on the Akonadi resources for Google's data services.

While working through my backlog of articles on Planet GNOME on my way to Nuremberg (yes, again), I came across a blog entry of Philip Van Hoof.

In it he asserts that soon the era of email clients will be over, which I think some people misinterpreted as application for reading and managing email messages becoming obsolete.

When people used to say that blogs are the new usenet, they meant that discussions and flamewars which used to happen on usenet newsgroups, now happen in blogs and their comment sections.

Some bloggers even use their new publishing channel for making inquiries, i.e. the famous and infamous "dear lazyweb" postings.

See? I wrote unconsciously even used "postings", not something like "personal log entry"!

Anyway.

This week I have been working on an Akonadi tutorial targetted at application developers.

Compare to the Akonadi Resource Tutorial this was rather difficult. Resources have a well defined task and a tutorial can being with a basic implementation and move on to more complex scenarios later on.

After I received a lot of positive feedback about my
Akonadi Resource Tutorial, or probably more accurate outright praises :), I knew I had to write another one.

This time I chose a topic that is probably less relevant for the majority of developers, however it should be helpful for people who either work on PIM applications with data types not yet covered by our current code or who want to use Akonadi for non-PIM data.

So I am in my hotel room here in Nürnberg now and a bit tired from the long days over the weekend, however I think a bit of coverage of the KDE PIM meeting is in order.

Tom already covered some of the aspects of the first two days so he probably will do another blog about the third one as well. Therefore I'll concentrate more on the overall aspects.

The following weekend will see this year's instance of the famous KDE PIM meeting in Osnabrück, Germany, as usual gratiously hosted by Intevation at their shiny new office.

I managed to convince the company I am currently working for that I can attend it and still make it to the final part of our site acceptance test in Nürnberg.
Actually, since I am already in Germany, it will require less traveling than going there and back again from Graz.

2008 has been a great year for me Free Software wise.

Not only did I get the opportunity to attend three awesome KDE developer meetings/sprints, I also got invited and attended the Linux Collaboration Summit.

However, personally the most important aspect of 2008 is me returning to serious KDE development. Hmm, probably not returning since my contributions in the early years more or less where heling other developers, doing a couple of fixes and enhancements, mainly in the KDE Games and KDE Edu areas.