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Thanks jdub for adding me to Planet GNOME!



For those who don't know me, I'm Sandy Armstrong. I co-maintain Tomboy, and right now I'm working on note synchronization.



I've been working on Tomboy for about a year now. My claim to fame is
consistently failing to finish my project of refactoring Tomboy
for easier porting to Windows and other platforms.

I live with my wife, Ellery...



...in San Diego...



...with a couple of strange creatures.





Some Background, streamofconsciousness-style

I grew up in Cincinnati, OH. I have a friend who went to Space Camp while I was busy sticking keys in electric sockets. I moved to Sacramento, CA to start high school around the time the GNOME project was announced. In the late 90's I installed LiteStep on my computer because I wanted it to look like GNOME. I didn't really know what GNOME was, but I knew it looked cool. When my buddy Gary was the first in the neighborhood to get DSL, I made him take a break from downloading music, Simpsons episodes, and porn to burn me a RedHat 5.1 CD, which I promptly installed on my grandmother's computer, much to her chagrin. These days, my mom runs Ubuntu and so do I, with a sprinkling of Gentoo on the server side. I lived in Las Vegas for awhile, but somehow never got a chance to hang out with Steven Brust. Oh, well.

Tomboy Online Mockup

Ellery caught me sketching out some mockups for a hypothetical Tomboy Online service. She took pity on me and sketched up something more presentable (click for larger version):


The idea is pretty simple. Somewhere out there (maybe on online.gnome.org?) you have an account for synchronizing your Tomboy notes. It's cool because you get free storage space for your notes without having to set up your own server. Then you can use Tomboy's new note synchronization feature to sync your notes to/from that server. The bonus aspect is the web app shown above. Features include:

• Ability to read all of your notes from any web browser on any computer when you log in.
• Notes maintain their formatting, tags, links (URLs and links to other notes), etc.
• You get your Recent Notes menu just like in real Tomboy, including note pinning.
• You can search your notes, or browse by date or tag, just like in real Tomboy.
  
• By default notes are private, but you can make any note public to allow your friends to see it (see the lock icon on the note?).
• From your Tomboy Online page, you can see new public notes from your friends in the Friends sidebar.
• Notes can be printed in a nice format.
• You can download any note (yours, a friend's, whatever) in its native .note format, which automatically imports the note into real Tomboy.

I think this service would be an awesome addition to the Online Desktop initiative. The mockup is very Tomboy-centric, but in reality this could be integrated into something like Mugshot or another existing service.

What do you guys think? I'd love to work on something like this during the next development cycle. We just have to solve the infrastructure problems, and it seems like the Online Desktop guys are interested in helping us out.

And before you ask...I don't think online note editing is a short-term goal here. I don't really want to rewrite Tomboy for the web. :-)