BasKet is dead. Long live BasKet(?)

Note: This post is a work in progress. Comments appreciated 🙂

In KDE 3 there was an application called BasKet, a general purpose notes and wiki application. It was incredibly awesome, and in general just kicked but. It was by far one of my favorite KDE 3 applications.

Unfortunately, this application never made the official switch to KDE 4, and only a few beta or alpha quality builds based on the Qt4 toolkit were made available. Over the last few days though, spurred by seeing various patches and videos flaoting around, I’ve been thinking about how easy it would be, with the frameworks written by various KDE teams, to reimplement BasKet as a really incredible note-taking application.

In essence, I think that most of BasKet’s functionality is already present in libplasma and nepomuk… so why not use it? Let’s take a look at the feature list that is on the front page of the basket website.

• Take Notes: Well, these would be the Notes applets we have at the moment.
• Paste any data into the application: Each data type could be associated with a type of applet. Of course, adding support for new applet would be simple because of the huge list of plasma’s supported applet languages.
• Organize pages hierarchically: Currently it is not possible to save and load plasma activities, but there is a patch on reviewboard that will solve that. This makes it a simple matter of creating a treeview to house the containments
• Organize data on a page in columns or in free form: This would be a standard Desktop Activity versus a Newspaper activity.
• Tag your notes: Nepomuk, anyone? 😀
• Quick filtering and searching of notes: Nepomuk (and possibly Strigi) anyone? 😀
• System Tray and background support: Sure, we could even use KNotificationItem.
• Autosave of data: Easy-peasy, I suppose.
• Password protection, and optionally public/private key encryption: Simple as well, I’d say
• Embeddable into kontact: This may be a little more interesting, depending on how well a plasma containment plays with Kontact.
• Quickly share your notes, either as a native BasKet file or an html webpage: Sure. We could even integrate KNewStuff3, if it seemed to make sense.
• Import your data from other applications: Just a matter of parsing 🙂

The room to expand is also really, really, open, I’d say. Imagine you create a small todo list as in the above screen shot. When you create this todo list, imagine that it was automatically added to KOrganizer via an Akonadi resource that parsed the new BasKet’s data files. There are so many different KDE 4 technologies that could fit into such a project as this, it seems like a really exciting way to get involved in far too many parts of KDE to stay sane 🙂

And it would also make a really awesome GSoC project. Personal views on Google and Summer of Code aside, this would be an extremely good Summer of Code project to work on, whether as my Rrix Summer of Code, or by sponsored by the Big G-Dog. I’m considering adding it to the list of possible 2010 GSoC projects, but I’m unsure of the scope of such a, possibly, large application. Where do we start? What is the end-of-summer goal? Who has their hands in enough places to be able to mentor a project like this?

What do you think? Lend me your support before I repost this syndicated to Planet KDE, my MANY MANY blag subscribers! 😛

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~ by Ryan Rix on 5 February 2010.