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LinuxPlanet: Preview: Aethera Brings Business-Level Contact Management to KDE2

“For almost as long as there has been a KDE, there has been talk
of the on-again, off-again Magellan project, a unified contact
management and email application with some PIM-like features. Every
few months discussion of the project would re-emerge on KDE mailing
lists, with new rumors of a release Real Soon Now.”

“In the last six months or so, development activity increased
considerably, with Magellan’s author, Teodor Mihai (known
universally as ‘Teddy’), working with theKompany.com to bring the
project to distributable form. Then, late last fall, what in the
movie industry are known as ‘artistic disagreements’ led to a
forking of the code. Teddy wanted one user interface, while
theKompany.com wanted another. Teddy’s project is still called
Magellan, while theKompany.com’s effort was renamed Aethera. And
now an early preview release of it has become available. It shows
real promise.”

“Aethera seeks to provide the functionality of a Lotus Notes or,
to a lesser extent, Outlook to the Linux desktop. While not all
features are enabled in the first preview release, plans for it are
ambitious.”

“‘It’s a communications platform; however we have a lot of other
things we plan to do with it,’ says Shawn Gordon, president of
theKompany.com. This includes taking full advantage of Aethera’s
plug-in architecture to let users — the target audience is small
to medium-sized businesses — add what they need without producing
an onerously bulky application. A client-server arrangement is in
the works, and while Aethera itself is GPLed, there will be some
plug-ins that will be available only for a fee (though developers
are of course free to produce others that they can distribute in
any way they choose).

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