Kraft is KDE/Qt based desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well chosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local.
Kraft is around for more than twelve years, but it has been a little quiet recently. However, Kraft is alive and kicking!
I am very happy to announce the first public beta version of Kraft V. 0.80, the first Kraft version that is based on KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5.x.
It did not only go through the process of being ported to Qt5/KF5, but I also took the opportunity to refactor and tackle a lot of issues that Kraft was suffering from in the past.
Here are a few examples, a full changelog will follow:
Akonadi dependency: Earlier Kraft versions had a hard dependency on Akonadi, because it uses the KDE Addressbook to manage customer addresses. Without having Akonadi up and running, Kraft was not functional. People who were testing Kraft without having Akonadi up were walking away with a bad impression of Kraft.
Because Akonadi and the KDE contacts integration is perfect for this use case, it still the way to go for Kraft, and I am delighted to build on such strong shoulders. But Kraft now also works without Akonadi. Users get a warning, that the full address book integration is not available, but can enter addresses manually and continue to create documents with Kraft. It remains fully functional.
Also, a better abstraction of the Akonadi-based functionality in Kraft eases porting to platforms where other system address books are available, such as MacOSX.
AppImage: The new Kraft is available as AppImage.
There was a lot of feedback that people could not test Kraft, because it was hard to set up or compile, and dependency are missing. The major Linux distributions seem to be unable to keep up with current versions of leaf packages like Kraft, and I can not do that for the huge variety of distros. So AppImage as container format for GUI applications seems to be a perfect fit here.
A lot more was done. Kraft got simplifications in both the code base and the functionality, careful gui changes, and a decreased dependency stack. You should check it out!
Today (on FOSDEM weekend, which could be a better date?) the pre version 0.80 beta10 is announced to the public.
I would appreciate if people test and report bugs at Github: That is where the development is currently happening.