Bringing KDE4 to KJots

Speaker: Stephen Kelly

KJots is a simple note taking application which has been part of KDE since the earliest releases of KDE in the late 1990s. The structure and appearance of the application changed little in the last ten years, but with the appearance of new technologies of Qt4 and KDE4 there is an opportunity to satisfy more of the needs users have for quick note taking.

Qt4 brought an improved rich text processing system and model-view framework, which make up the core components of KJots. These improvements from Qt bring new flexibility to what can be achieved with a note taking application. By separating the model from the view, it is possible to share the application data between multiple views or even multiple processes. In KDE4 this allows for KJots data to be available on a plasma canvas for example. Addtionally, the Akonadi platform brings opportunities to store KJots notes in multiple remote locations and transfer easily and simply to mobile phones for example, and Nepomuk will bring semantic processing of KJots notes.

New interface possibilities are also brought by using the model-view system. A custom view could make it possible to to have more intuitive control over the structure of notes or make it behave more like an outliner application. It is also planned to bring new theming capabilities to KJots for data export and giving users more control over the appearance of their exported notes using a separate template system.