Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Recent Releases: Tomboy 1.3.1, Snowy 0.1, Stewie 0.12

'Yo Quiero Tomboy Online', remixed from 'Benito Chihuahua'


Monday I made two releases: Tomboy 1.3.1 and Snowy 0.1.

Tomboy 1.3.1 is our second development release of the cycle. So far we have been focusing on bug fixing, cleaning out old patches from bugzilla, and removing use of APIs that are deprecated for GNOME 3.0. Some highlights of 1.3.0 and 1.3.1 are:

  • New topic-based help from Paul Cutler and others on the GNOME docs team should provide a more useful way to get help when using Tomboy.
  • Panel applet support is now disabled by default (distributors, please use --enable-panel-applet when configuring) to drop most GNOME 2 dependencies (many thanks to Javier Jardón for this, and Aaron Borden for other API usage updates).
  • Alejandro Cura added libproxy support to web sync, and there was much rejoicing.
  • If you're hacking on Tomboy and are sick of having to install to test your changes, you'll be glad to hear that make run finally works again.
  • We added a couple of hidden preferences that we may expose in the Preferences UI this cycle: hiding the tray icon is handy for folks who use Docky or gnome-do instead of the tray menu (Matthew Pirocchi), and deleting notes without being prompted for confirmation may speed up your workflow (Jeff Stoner).
  • Brian Mattern fixed a bug noticeable on Ubuntu, where the panel applet wasn't using their fancy new icons.
  • In bullet list land, Owen Williams fixed an irritating printing bug, and Stefan Schweizer fixed some keyboard navigation issues.


I'm really glad to have so many contributors helping out this cycle, as I've been splitting my time between two babies. First, here's a cute picture of my awesome son Stewart Daniel Kekoa Armstrong, who was born on May 16th:

Stewie 0.12


The other baby is Snowy, the AGPL Django app that will power the upcoming Tomboy Online free web service. We had planned on releasing according to the GNOME schedule, but wanted to wait until we added OpenID support to limit how many times alpha testers need to wipe their databases and start over again. ;-)

So today, I am proud to offer our first development release of Snowy: 0.1, the Chihuahua release. Ripped from the headlines, here are the features:
  • An implementation of the Tomboy web sync REST API (the same API that Ubuntu One implements for note sync)
  • OpenID support, so you can log in with your Google/Launchpad/whatever account
  • Read-only online note access (notes can be made publicly readable in the admin UI for now)
  • A friendly Tomboy-like web UI for accessing your notes, supporting rich text, note links, note pinning, full-text search, etc
  • An initial unit test suite


Although Brad Taylor wrote most of the initial app, and I did a lot of the sync related work, I'd really like to call attention to some of our awesome contributors who have made this release possible:

  • Leon Handreke improved our sync code, fixed a ton of our unit tests (on multiple occasions), and added OpenID support so that you can log in with your Google account or any other OpenID, instead of having to remember a new username/password pair for our little service. He also made some slick improvements to our note search UI.
  • Sander Dijkhuis made improvements to our web UI, improved the ease of testing deployment by adding a fake mail server, and has been active on bugzilla and in IRC helping people work through deployment issues.
  • Benoit Garrett, Stuart Langridge, and Olivie Le Thanh Duong have made numerous contributions to the REST API, OAuth support, and upstream django-piston, which is the library we use to achieve those features.
  • We've also had great contributions from Adam Ziolkowski, Andy Duplain, Jordan Keyes, Mike Gorse, Ray Wang, and Shayne Macaulay.
  • And we'd love to add your name to this list! We need Python hackers, designers, HTML/CSS pros, Javascript wranglers, testers, Django deployment experts...and I could use a babysitter, too.


Please join us in #snowy on GIMPNet, or on our mailing list, and help us bring Tomboy to your web.

10 comments:

Lucas Rocha said...

Big congrats for the Stewie release! :-)

Unknown said...

Exciting! Aside from Ubuntu One, is Snowy 0.1 running anywhere yet? Are there any plans for an official Tomboy (or Gnome)-hosted Snowy server?

Sandy said...

@Matthew We plan to launch Tomboy Online on GNOME servers in time for GNOME 3.0, assuming we are confident of security, stability, and scalability at that time.

Tomboy Online will run Snowy, but Ubuntu One does not. They have their own server software and their own implementation of the Tomboy Web REST API.

However, Stuart Langridge from Canonical has contributed to Snowy, and he and Rodrigo Moya have been very involved in the development of the REST API and general discussions about Tomboy note synchronization.

hunger said...

So excited about Snowy and Tomboy Online; thanks so much to everybody involved for all their hard work.

The roadmap (http://live.gnome.org/Snowy/TomboyOnlineRoadmap) suggests that the service will be "invite only" during the first couple of phases; any way interested users can get on the invite list?

Sandy said...

@hunger Honestly? Initially it will just be known folks from IRC who we know won't bitch if they lose notes or experience a security breach while we're in the early days, and who we know will file bugs and give constructive criticism.

I don't know if we'll have a more public invite-only phase (with an email signup) or just go immediately to open beta.

Your best best for super-early access is to hang out in #snowy or on snowy-list and contribute in whatever way you can. Otherwise, hopefully you won't have to wait too long. ;-)

hunger said...

Fair enough, thanks. I haven't been on IRC in years, but maybe I'll make a new habit of it. :D Thanks again!

schmichael said...

Any viable Android client with Dropbox (or some sort of web) syncing? I'd definitely pay a buck or more for it. :-)

Sandy said...

@schmichael: Tomdroid is a Tomboy note reader for Android that has a web-sync branch that should work, but is not yet merged or officially released.

Keep an eye out for updates.

Unknown said...

Tomdroid appears to have been abandoned. I also need an Android app that will read my Tomboy notes. I don't really need to take many notes on a mobile, but being able to read my notes would be very convenient. Just a reader shouldn't be that difficult.

Whatever happened to Snowy? I've heard nothing about it until I landed here searching for an Android version of Tomboy. I would be interested in trying it.

Sandy said...

@Stan: you can ask the Tomdroid guys on their mailing list what's going on with that project.

Snowy is chugging along, we had a hackfest in November, several releases since this blog, and it is currently powering the private Tomboy Online alpha hosted on GNOME servers.

You can fill out this survey to get an invite: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFZleG05V196b3g4VUFSTHhzcTRFMmc6MQ