Hi!
I just released Akunambol 0.1, a KDE application to sync your Akonadi data with a SyncML server. You want to use Akunambol to have a full backup of your contacts and calendar, and why not, synchronize and share your address book (and calendar) between your mobile, your iPod touch, your Google account and your KDE desktop. Read more to know how to do that.

Akunambol has been built using the Funambol C++ SDK, as part of their code sniper program. I announced it yesterday on their mailing list, but I think that it deserves also a blog post, since it may be of interest for the KDE community. This is the first release aimed at first adapters; however in my testing it resulted to be very stable for the few things it does. There shouldn’t be any data losses, but a backup is as always advised.

If you want to check out the code, please beware that it still kills kittens here and there. For now this is a release that works, and I will  fix most code issues for 0.3 when I’ll be implementing calendar support, thus abstracting much of the code.

Check it out, follow the development, fork, clone and hack on it at: http://gitorious.org/akunambol
Or, just download a tarball from http://github.com/ruphy/akunambol/tarball/v0.1
(yes, it’s github, unfortunately gitorious is still implementing on-the-fly tarball generation for a tag ;-) )

Here’s an extract from the mail sent to the funambol mailing list:

This is a stable release, but of a very immature software – please
treat it as such. Make sure you have a backup of your data before
attempting to synchronize. Fortunately Akonadi allows that with a
single click (check out the akonaditray utlity).

For now Akunambol only synchronizes contacts, the code still kills some
kittens in certain places, but I already successfully synced several
contact datasets flawlessly. :-)
In other words, the few things that Akunambol does for now should work
perfectly. If they don’t it’s a bug.

Please test it and report any problems, suggestions or patches you
might have.

Ok, now that you know something about akunambol, how to get started actually using it?

First, you need to compile and install the funambol SDK. Download it at http://download.forge.objectweb.org/sync4j/funambol-client-sdk-8.0.1.zip, to compile it it’s the typical autotools build system. There may also be a Debian package available created by a funambol developer, I will edit this article with the link once he sends it to me.

Once Funambol is installed, you can compile and install Akunambol like a normal KDE application, using cmake.

The next thing you need is a SyncML server on which you can push and retrieve your contacts. A “remote storage”. You can either install your own or get a free account at my.funambol.com.

Now you’re set. Start Akunambol, insert your username and password, eventually change the sync URL, and press “Sync contacts” to let the magic begin.

That’s all for now! Next releases will include a much more sexy UI, calendar and tasks syncronization too. Stay tuned!