I am happy to announce the release of the stable Kraft version 0.80 (Changelog).

Kraft is 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 choosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local.

After more than a dozen years of life time, Kraft is now reaching a new level: It is now completely ported to Qt5 / KDE Frameworks 5 and with that, it is compatible with all modern Linux distributions again.

KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5 are the best base for modern desktop software and Kraft integrates seamlessly into all Linux desktops. Kraft makes use of the great KDE PIM infrastructure with KAddressbook and Akonadi.

In addition to the port that lasted unexpectedly over 12 months, Kraft v. 0.80 got a whole bunch of improvements, just to name some examples:

More Flexible Addressbook Integration

As Akonadi is optional now, Kraft can be built without it. Even if it was built with, but Akonadi for whatever reason is not working properly, Kraft still runs smoothly. In that case it only lacks the convenience of address book integration.

The Address book access was also nicely abstracted so that other Addressbook backends can be implemented more easily.

GUI Improvements

Even though the functionality and GUI of Kraft was not changed dramatically compared to the last stable KDE 4 version, there were a few interesting changes in the user interface.

  • A new, bigger side bar simplifies navigation.
  • In the timeline view, a click on years and month in the treeview show summaries of the selected time span, ie. the number of documents with financial summaries per month or year.
  • A filter allows to limit the view on the current week or month.

Reduction of dependencies

Kraft makes broad use of the core Qt5 libraries. The required KDE dependencies were reduced to a bare minimum. Akonadi libraries, which enable KDE PIM integration are now optional. The former dependency on heavyweight web browser components were completely removed and replaced by the far more simple richtext component of Qt.

These changes make it not only easier and more transparent to build Kraft but allow make a port to other platforms like MacOSX more easy in the future.

Under the Hood

A countless number of bugfixes and small improvements went in. Also updates to the newer C++ concepts where applicable make the rather mature code base more modern and better maintainable.

The Reportlab based PDF document creation script was updated and merged with a later version for example.

Deployment

Installing Kraft is still a bit complicated for unexperienced users, and distributions sometimes haven’t made a good job in the past to provide the latest version of Kraft.

To make it easier to test, there is an AppImage of Kraft 0.80 available that should be runable on most modern distributions. Just download a single file that can be started right away after having added the executable permissions.

Linux packages are already built for openSUSE (various versions) or Gentoo.

Kraft’s website will contain a lot more information.