Future Kontact Evolution

Nestled in the heart of Prague, at the ornate Kavárna Místo, Nathan and I sat across from each other with coffee warming our hands while the distant church bells threaded softly through the open window. The calm of the room stood in sharp contrast to the velocity of the ideas that soon followed.​

As he spoke, Nathan unfolded a vision that landed with uncanny precision on an old fault line in my own memory: Kontact 2.0, an opinionated, comprehensive environment for a working mind, not just another app. It was not some idle brainstorm; it resonated with the years when I lived inside KDE’s Kontact, running most of my intellectual and logistical life from that single, integrated PIM.​

In my head the contours began to form immediately: a modern, humane interface; markdown as the backbone for notes; clean compatibility with tools like Obsidian so ideas are never trapped in a silo. The stack tugged at me as well—Rust hovered at the front of the pack, if only because cross‑platform speed and safety would be non‑negotiable for something that wants to be the nervous system of a person’s work. Mail, calendar, tasks, feeds, chat, and a personal assistant—none of these alone are novel, but their deliberate orchestration absolutely is.​

And yet, the more I tried to map this vision onto the current landscape—LM Studio, MCP‑based options, assorted half‑solutions—the more the friction mounted. For a moment, that friction felt like a wall. Then the obvious surfaced: I was not looking for a client; I had already been designing one in my head for months. Kontact 2.0 was less a product spec than an externalization of a client I, myself, have been quietly needing.​

That realization snapped the problem into a different frame. There is already a spec sheet—“Kontact 2.0”—waiting to be treated as a living contract rather than a wish list. Instead of hunting endlessly for a perfect existing solution, the task becomes ruthlessly simpler: refine the spec, identify what can be built now, and accept that the rest will emerge through iteration.​

Walking away from that conversation, one lesson lingered with unusual clarity: the distance between a vague longing and a concrete system is often far shorter than it feels. The work is to stop treating ideas as diary entries and start treating them as architectural drawings—to move them, piece by piece, from ambient dream into running code.