Kig
Description of KAdddressbook by Jos Poortvliet.
On KDE's PIM website there is just one line referring to Kaddressbook: an addressbook viewer / frontend for KDE. Well, this is the application of this month. And, despite this short reference to Kaddressbook from KDE's PIM site, its a well-crafted application. The website of Kaddressbook tells us "Kaddressbook is a comfortable frontend to organize the addresses of your friends, business partners, etc.
Kaddressbook allows you to import and export addressbook files, offers a function to search for addresses and - which is the most important feature: it is fully integrated into the K Desktop Environment and interacts with other KDE applications like e.g. KMail."
Kaddressbook can be used within Kontact, KDE's powerfull Personal Information Management-container. Drag'n'drop works, it has LDAP support, categories, and it is fully integrated in KDE. You can see if someone is online on Kopete, Kmail uses your addressbook for name completion in the send-too, and of course vcards get opened in Kaddressbook, embedded in Konqueror! Yes, this is a powerfull program. Still, most people never really noticed it, although they have been using it since they started Kmail or Kontact for the first time. Have you ever opened a menubar in Kaddressbook? Seen what it can do?
A nice Kaddressbook feature are the categories you can put your contacts in. If you carefully choose them, you can set up Kmail to filter your incoming mails according to those categories, and ensure that your emails are properly sorted. One advantage is that you don't have to make a filter for every contact in your addressbook. Another advantage is that when someone changes his/her email address, or adds a new one, you only have to change it in his/her contact- in Kaddressbook, and Kmail will filter on his/her new emailaddress.
You can do this, by opening settings -> configure filters, and when making a new filter, you will see the "contains" dropdown also has "is in category". So you simply select "From" in the first drop-down, and "is in category" in the second. Now you can select a category (the third dropdown that just appeared), and your filter is finished.
It is also very easy to find your contacts in Kaddressbook. You can tell Kaddressbook to show a jump button bar, which will help you find your contacts (settings -> show jumpbar). Also, the quick search bar can be used to simply give a name, and the drop-down lists can narrow the searchlist to certain categories in your addressbook.
And what about having several addressbook entries for the same person? Just select them, choose "edit" from your menubar, and choose "merge". It does exactly what you think...
Try to click an address in your contact information window. Yes, indeed, it will load a webpage with a map of the location of this contact! And there is more to explore - cryptographic settings, logo's and sounds, custom fields and pages for contacts, excellent import- and export filters, its all there.
Have a look at Kaddressbook's online place: Don't forget to check out the screenshots, there is some nice information in there!
Beschrijving van Kig door Tom Verbreyt, maar dan op nogal rigide wijze overgenomen uit het Kig-handboek. Lees vooral verder met het interview met de ontwikkelaar van Kig, Dominique Devriese.
Laatst gewijzigd: 15 juni 2004 door: Fabrice Mous