My Letter to Amazon

Dear Amazon,

I am writing to ask you to make my Amazon Instant Video purchases available for download, DRM-free.

I am a big fan of your service, and in the last year I have cancelled my cable service and begun to rely heavily on digital purchases from your store to bring new content to my family.

However, as we have settled into this, some major disadvantages of your service have become clear:

1) Many of my devices (phones, tablets, etc) do not have support for viewing Amazon Instant Video content.
2) If I'm having a bad internet night, I cannot watch the content I purchased.
3) If I am making a long drive for a vacation, my son cannot watch any Amazon content I have purchased.
4) I cannot lend my content to friends who want to check it out for themselves, like I can with DVDs.
5) I cannot back up my content in case something catastrophic happens to your service.

I am aware of the existing download option.  It is Windows-only and uses DRM and is therefore useless to me.  DRM'd files cannot be unlocked in the event of you turning off your authentication servers.  And, obviously, they cannot be played in arbitrary devices.

Now, if there were good tools for removing the DRM, this would not be as big of an issue for me as a consumer.  I would just remove it and go on my merry way.

Unfortunately, such tools do not exist.  It would be far easier for me to pirate content I've already purchased from Amazon Instant Video in order to watch on my tablet, make backups, lend to friends, and have offline access.

But it seems inevitable to me that if I begin taking the risk to pirate content I've paid for, I will quickly find that it is easier to never pay for it in the first place.  At that point, you will have lost me as a recurring customer.

I'm not trying to threaten you, but I think you should realize that I am becoming a dissatisfied customer of yours, and the natural consequence in order to get the sort of access I want to the content I buy appears to be piracy.

I love that your Amazon MP3 service is DRM-free.  I don't buy a lot of music, but I have very happily used your service for years when an album came out that I wanted.  I have preferred it heavily when compared to iTunes and similar services.

Please follow the great example you set with Amazon MP3, and make Amazon Instant Video purchases available for download without DRM as well.

Trying to stay a loyal customer,
Sandy Armstrong

Time for a litl change

Last week was my last with Novell.

This week is my first with litl.



Novell was a great place to work and I recommend it to anyone. I will miss the Mono Accessibility team, but the beauty of being an open source project is that I can just pop into IRC or review some code on ReviewBoard when I'm feeling nostalgic.

At litl, I'll be working with Brad and his crack team to make the channel experience EVEN MORE AWESOME.

If you're wondering "what will the impact be on Tomboy/Snowy/etc?", the answer is that you can expect more polish on the Mac version of Tomboy now that I'll be dogfooding it every day. And it looks like I'll be switching Snowy to use lxml. Nothing else should change. I still intend to be as involved in GNOME as Stewie will let me. ;-)

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.

Last Call for GNOME Summer of Code 2010 Ideas! Student proposal period starts Monday!

On Saturday a small group of SoC mentors will sort through the list of ideas on the wiki, clean them up, remove those we don't want to recommend to students, and highlight those we find especially alluring.

If you have ideas for your project, you have today and tomorrow to add them to the wiki before our meeting. Please place new ideas in the "Other Ideas" section.

The student proposal period starts Monday. If you want to help review student proposals, please sign up as a mentor. If you don't use your full name and include details when applying to be a mentor, we may not know who you are, so if you choose to do that please email me, Ruben, or Daniel with your link_id so we don't reject you. :-) We have to be careful because there are some sneaky or confused students out there who try to sign up as mentors.

The ideas page will be under tight control after our meeting on Saturday, but it will still be possible to add ideas if you check with folks in #soc-admin or on the GNOME soc-mentors-list first.

Tomboy 1.1.4 Brings Automatic Synchronization

Monday I released Tomboy 1.1.4. Last month's 1.1.2 release was actually the first to feature automatic note synchronization (herein referred to as 'autosync'), but in 1.1.4 the feature is less annoying and you can actually turn it on in the Preferences UI. Here's the only possible autosync screenshot:


Here are some facts about autosync:

• It assumes the server is always right when conflicts occur, so if you actually found Tomboy's conflict-handling UI useful, don't use autosync
  
• When a sync occurs, it desensitizes all note windows, because Tomboy sync is still a bit insistent on believing in transactions.
  
• But in theory this should never be a problem for you, because Tomboy will never sync while you are editing a note. It will wait until *at least* one minute has passed where you have not been editing.
  
• Besides this desensitization of note windows, there is no indication at all that a sync has occurred. Next cycle, I intend to use libnotify bubbles and/or status icon changes where they make sense to let the user know if new updates have been downloaded, or if the sync server appears to be down, etc. Right now this feature is totally silent, though you can get a few details if you run from a terminal with --debug.

It's unfortunate that I've been too busy to publicize this feature until so very late in the cycle. I'd appreciate any testing, feedback, bug reports, etc. At this point all I can say is that it Works For Me.

Other sync-related news:

• Rumor has it that Ubuntu One note sync can no longer mangle your notes, unless you use their web editor, in which case the mangling is much less severe than in the past. I keep getting emails from Launchpad saying that Rodrigo has fixed yet another of the old irritating bugs, to the point that I've lost track and think he may have gotten the last of them! :-) This is great news for U1 users, who previously suffered from a few serious sync bugs.
  
• I've started the ball rolling on deploying Snowy on GNOME servers (this would be known as Tomboy Online, if the marketing team approves...I still need to email them).
  
• We have another Snowy planning meeting this weekend.
  
• Many thanks to Leon Handreke and Sander Dijkhuis for their valuable contributions to Snowy in git.
  
• Tomdroid 0.3.1 is out, and although it doesn't yet include web sync, the merge is impending!

Another feature in Tomboy 1.1.4 makes me very happy, might upset Tomboy old-timers, and could possibly cause Alex Graveley to destroy my very soul:

By default, when you rename a note, Tomboy will no longer automatically update all of the text that used to link to that note. Instead, if other notes link to the renamed note, Tomboy will show you a dialog (lame, I know, I intend to bind GtkInfoBar for next cycle to eliminate all dialogs in Tomboy) that lets you choose what to do. Here's an example screenshot, with the Advanced section expanded:



Some have argued that automatic link renaming is part of Tomboy's magic, but many many users (including me) consider this dark magic to be a serious potential data loss bug. If you've ever had a note called "Linux", and renamed it to "openSUSE", and been dismayed to find that everywhere in your notes where it used to say "linux" it now says "openSUSE", you know what I'm talking about.

In the future, I'd like to allow folks to have more control over note linking behavior. Many users have expressed a desire to turn off automatic linking, or to be able to link arbitrary text to another note (not just text that matches the note's title). Enough people have asked for it that it'll probably happen, though of course patches would make it happen faster.

Next time you hear from me, Tomboy 1.2.0 should be out, and we should be making progress on getting Tomboy Online deployed!

Tomboy 1.1.1 Released, Tomboy Online Plans Solidify

Tomboy 1.1.1 Brings New Ones

After a brief release hiatus, I bring you Tomboy's latest development release: version 1.1.1!

Probably the coolest new feature in this release, courtesy of Stefan Cosma, is support for Windows 7 Jump Lists, which are totally awesome and should be added to GNOME.

Jump Lists In Action

Another cool fix that will make Dave Richards (and everyone else who has ever wanted to copy and paste a Tomboy note into an email or OpenOffice.org document) very happy. Gabriel Burt fixed a long-standing problem with gtk# to enable this (requires not-yet-released gtk# 2.12.10), and patched Tomboy to make rich HTML available in the clipboard. Thanks dude!

Pasting rich note content into Evolution (click for OO.o Writer and plain-text email examples)

I was planning on having a preview of automatic background sync in this release, but I just didn't get as far as I wanted on it. I'll be merging that feature in before the next release, though.

But while I was playing with autosync, I was doing a lot of restarting Tomboy, and got tired of the 2 second startup time. Most Tomboy users always run it, so startup time is not a huge deal, but for developers this just gets irritating after awhile. So I rejiggered some startup work to be delayed, causing the Tomboy icon to show up within about 0.5-1.0 seconds on my machine. This pleased me, so I included it in Tomboy 1.1.1. Take that fascist scum!

The Future of Snowy and Tomboy Online

You may have seen Brad's blog last week about our Snowy meeting. If you read the meeting minutes, you'll see that we're shifting our focus to be a little more goal-oriented. Our plan is to get a Snowy instance on GNOME servers as soon as the sysadmin team will let us. This instance will be Tomboy Online, and its needs will drive core Snowy development. We'll start with a private alpha and go from there.

Right now we're working on a Tomboy Online roadmap that breaks outstanding work into basic tasks so that contributors know where they can help. Once this roadmap is in better shape, I'll be blogging again to let you know what our plans are and how you can help us.

In the meantime, if you have any resources to share on automated testing of web sites, REST APIs, and overall web/server security, I'd really appreciate it. Ponies are great...pwnies, not soo much.

By the way, if you have opinions about GNOME hosting Free web services like Tomboy Online, please take Stormy's survey on GNOME Foundation goals for 2010! :-)

New Tomboy Releases with Ubuntu One support on all platforms, and other goodies in the Tomboy world

On Monday I announced our new stable release, Tomboy 1.0.1, and our new development release, Tomboy 1.1.0. They both share the following fixes:

• Official support for Ubuntu One (and any other server that implements the Tomboy Web REST API and uses OAuth 1.0a...Snowy uses OAuth 1.0). This patch comes from friend and Canonical employee Rodrigo Moya.
  
• Always show note icons in the recent notes menu.
  
• Link to correct version of our help document on Windows and Mac.
  
• Translation updates, etc.

With Tomboy 1.1.0, you also get these fixes and features:

• New D-Bus methods for manipulating notebooks thanks to Clemens Buss.
  
• New Synchronize Notes menu item for the panel applet.
  
• Cleaned up the sync dialog so it shouldn't cut off text anymore.
  
• A ton of great fixes for Windows users from Stefan Cosma, and printing should now work on Windows Vista and Windows 7.
  
• Translation updates, other fixes, and another new D-Bus method from Matt Jones.

For openSUSE users, packages are available in GNOME:Apps:Tomboy and GNOME:Apps:Tomboy:Unstable. Ubuntu Jaunty and Karmic users can use packages from our stable PPA or our development PPA.

But the most exciting things happening in the Tomboy world right now aren't really about Tomboy at all. :-)

You may have already seen Eitan Isaacson's new Note Statistics add-in. It's not the first add-in like this, but it seems to be the most comprehensive, and it's up on github for added coolness. I'm trying to decide if I should add this to the upstream Tomboy add-ins, or use it to kick-start a community add-in repository. Any opinions?

Back on the subject of Ubuntu One and note synchronization, I want to first say that Snowy, the AGPL web service for Tomboy notes, is still an active project, and we still plan to have Tomboy Online in beta in the next few months. Having both main developers on the same team at Novell just means we both get busy with work at the same time. :-)

Manuel's Tomboy Online Logo Mockup

But recently, Manuel Holzleitner has posted some mockups for the following:

• A front page for Tomboy Online
  
• A new website for Tomboy
  
• A new project website for Snowy
  
• New logos for all
  
• (Somewhat hidden) A new layout for Snowy:

Manuel's Tomboy Online Mockup

I'm not a designer or UI expert, but I'm a big fan of these mockups. For one thing, I've been wanting to revamp the Tomboy website for a long time now, and Manuel's idea of unifying the design of all of these sites seems obvious in retrospect. I also think the proposed logos are ridiculously cute and web-appropriate. There seem to be a few folks interested in helping us out with our HTML/CSS, etc, so I'm really looking forward to having a better-looking Snowy in the near future.

Once we expand our test suite a bit and work through our deployment story, I don't think there will be much standing in the way of a Tomboy Online alpha running Snowy.

Manuel's Snowy Logo Mockup

Of course, in the mean time, people can use Ubuntu One, since those guys were awesome enough to use the same REST API for sync as Snowy uses. In fact, as I've mentioned before, Rodrigo and Stuart from Canonical both helped out with the design of this API, and even the implementation in Snowy. It's still proprietary software, but at least the guys working on it are awesome. ;-)

And if you have been wanting to get your notes from Tomboy to Ubuntu One to your Android device, there is now working code to do this in Tomdroid's web-sync branch. Thanks to Benoit Garret holding my hand, I was even able to contribute a patch. :-P With Benoit's latest code in bzr, you can now sync Tomdroid with Ubuntu One. There are still a few fixes needed to make this releasable, but for anyone who's looking to get involved in Android development, here's a fun project to hack on for you!

In a similar story, Cornelius Hald has been updating Conboy (a C port of Tomboy for Maemo devices) so that it, too, can sync with Ubuntu One. It already supported Snowy sync last I heard, so the only hurdle was (again) supporting the changes in OAuth 1.0a. Last week Cornelius got it working, so I wouldn't be surprised if he has a release soon.

In other fun news, about a month ago Mohanaraj Gopala Krishnan emailed me to discuss a presentation he was planning for the FOSS.my conference in Malaysia. The topic of the presentation was Tomboy, Snowy, web sync, Ubuntu One, etc etc. Go read his fun slides on his blog .

That's all for now! I'll talk to you again after non-Canadian Thanksgiving.

One-click install for Banshee Telepathy Sharing Extension 0.1.1

Over the course of the summer, you may have read Neil Loknath's various blog posts about his Summer of Code project that lets you share your Banshee music library with your Telepathy contacts.



Well, it's pretty cool stuff, and now that he's started making releases, it's a great opportunity for people to try it out and give him feedback.

If you're using openSUSE 11.2, you can get version 0.1.1 of his extension through this handy one-click install link.

Note that my little repository includes upgrades to telepathy-gabble, telepathy-mission-control, and gnutls. You'll need to log out/in or kill all telepathy/empathy/mission-control processes before the changes take affect.

If you're like me and prefer to build Banshee from source and Neil's extension from source but don't want to reinstall your entire Telepathy stack from source, just install telepathy-gabble and telepathy-mission-control from my repository (this will cause a few gnutls packages to upgrade as well), and you'll be good to go.



Let me know if you have any issues, but let's consider these packages officially unsupported, could break your Empathy, impregnate your cat, etc.

Tomboy 1.2 Planning Meeting Today

"Cows are plentiful in Segovia?", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

In one hour (12:30 US Pacific time, 19:30 UTC), we'll be holding our cycle-ly planning meeting to make some plans for the next Tomboy release.

If you want to comment, listen, volunteer, or heckle, please join us in #tomboy on GIMPNet.

Oh, by the way, if you've been wanting to follow Tomboy updates on Twitter but you find me way to garrulous, you can now follow @tomboy for some peace of mind. We have @tomboy on identi.ca, too.

Tomboy Hits 1.0

It's been just over five years since Alex Graveley made the first commit to Tomboy CVS, unleashing a brilliantly simple note-taking application for people who just wanted to Get Stuff Done.

Tomboy Back In The Day (click for Alex's blog post)

Three years ago (right after I joined the project), Tomboy became a part of GNOME 2.16. It was about this time that Boyd Timothy joined the fun and became a co-maintainer with Alex. Much of the polish in Tomboy and many of the features you take for granted such as notebooks, synchronization, and bulleted lists appeared during his stewardship. After helping with sync, I was "promoted" to co-maintainer, too.

After Boyd and Calvin Gaisford (of Giver and Tasque fame) left to start their own company last year, I was left as the sole maintainer. I'm trying to do my part to build on the legacy left by Alex and Boyd. Fortunately for me, Tomboy seems to attract cool people like Chris Scobell, Stefan Schweizer, Benjamin Podszun, and dozens of others who have contributed major features and fixes.

One of the funny little things that tends to come up at Tomboy planning meetings is the version number. Tomboy's been around for five years now, and really it's been a pretty solid app for the majority of that history, especially once it became part of the GNOME desktop. So why is it versioned like some alpha product?

Tomboy in your dock (click for full-screen shot)

Tomboy runs on every major operating system, is used by 50 kabillion people every day [citation needed], and even if we have more grand plans, Tomboy today really does help people Get Stuff Done.

So we're calling our new stable release 1.0, the first release of the 1.0.x stable series. The next big stable release will be 1.2, etc etc. I hope this arbitrary change will instill a sense of confidence in users, and maybe even get people thinking about what "Tomboy 2.0" might mean.

Here's what's new in Tomboy 1.0 since the 0.14.x stable releases:

• WebSync add-in lets you synchronize your notes with the upcoming Tomboy Online web service, your own server running Snowy, or any other server implementing the new Tomboy Web REST API, which will soon include Ubuntu One and Midgard. Big thanks to Rodrigo Moya and Stuart Langridge from Canonical for their help on this.
  
• NoteDirectoryWatcher add-in from Michael Fletcher (disabled by default) finally lets you edit your note files outside of Tomboy safely, even while it's running, opening the door for all sorts of ad-hoc sync solutions if you don't want to use a server.
  
• Underline add-in from Mark Wakim (disabled by default).
  
• Faster start-up.
  
• UI improvements in note searching.
  
• More keyboard shortcuts.
  
• Loads of bug fixes.
  
• Updated documentation (a complete revamp is on the way for the GNOME 2.30 cycle).
  
• Notes and other files migrated to new standard directories.

I'm really excited about this release, because to me it represents a foundation. A lot of cruft has been cleaned up. Tomboy is leaner and meaner. Note and configuration files have moved to standard locations, making backups and upgrades better. Accessing those note files is now a less scary proposition. This is a good foundation on which we can build Tomboy's future.

With that in mind, here are some features I would love to tackle for Tomboy 1.2 if we can:

• Automatic synchronization.
  
• More work on Snowy, Tomboy Online, and social features integrated right into Tomboy.
  
• Note sharing via Telepathy, and maybe even collaborative editing.
  
• A new innovative workflow for managing simple task lists (with integration points for EDS or Tasque wherever it makes sense).
  
• Customizable, themeable, simplified note UI.
  
• Rethinking notebooks and search.
  
• Better gnome-shell integration.
  
• Better Tomboy experience on Mac OS X.
  
• Additional memory and performance enhancements.
  
• Your ideas and patches!

Personally, I'm really inspired by GNOME 2.28's "Made to Share" slogan, so I expect that will be a running theme in Tomboy 1.2.

I'll make sure to announce when we pick a date and time for our roadmap planning meeting, which is when we will choose what features we really want to focus on this cycle.

You may have read that we now have an official PPA for Ubuntu users. This is all thanks to Alan Pope and Jorge Castro. Since the announcement of the PPA a few other people have joined the tomboy-packagers team so I'm looking forward to being able to provide instant gratification to Ubuntu users on any distro since Jaunty, whether they want the latest stable or the latest development release.

In openSUSE land, the GNOME team is working on a specific organization for repositories like this, but I have the packages ready in my home project, so if you want Tomboy 1.0.0 for openSUSE 11.1 or later (including SLED 11), you can get them here for now:

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

Tomboy 0.15.6 Released, ~/.tomboy is no more

"Light Hearts", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

Yesterday I released Tomboy 0.15.6 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. The biggest change is invisible to most users: we've gotten rid of ~/.tomboy.

Anybody who's backed up their notes or created Rube Goldberg-esque sync solutions is familiar with this hidden directory holding note files, user-installed add-ins, and various bits of configuration. As of today, ~/.tomboy is no more. We've separated out notes, configuration, temporary files, and even the log, and relocated them according to FreeDesktop.org standards on Linux, and appropriate conventions on Mac OS X and Windows. Everything will be automatically be moved. Details available on this wiki page.

The benefits of this move to users are:

• Users who are already trained to back up directories like ~/.config and ~/.local won't have to remember to add ~/.tomboy to that list (same argument for ~/Library on Mac OS X)
  
• Folks who want to set up their own ad-hoc note sync will now have a much easier time, because they can just sync the notes folder. Use any popular method of synchronizing a directory (rsync, iFolder, UbuntuOne, Dropbox, whatever), and combine that with our NoteDirectoryWatcher add-in, and you should be good to go. You'll miss some benefits of our sync infrastructure, like conflict handling, but you'll gain one big feature missing from Tomboy: automatic synchronization.

If you maintain some tool that expects Tomboy note files to live in ~/.tomboy, please update it to also look in (by default) ~/.local/share/tomboy. Thanks!

In the previous release I cleaned up the Search UI according to input from Andreas and Kalle at GCDS:

The original Search UI: Pretty with a lot of wasted space and one useless feature (click for full window)

The updated Search UI: Cleaner, lest wasted space (click for full window)

Other changes since the last time I blogged:

• New underline formatting add-in from Mark Wakim
  
• Keyboard shortcuts for changing font size
  
• Improvements to HTML export
  
• Less command line output unless you run Tomboy with --debug (this actually has a positive impact on performance, by the way)
  
• Add "Get More Add-Ins..." button in the Preferences UI
  
• In SSH sync, we no longer force port 22 if no port is specified

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

See you in Gran Canaria!

Pounding a bowl of cereal. Almost time to leave for my flight!

On Sunday I'll be giving a talk about the UI Automation spec, and the work of the Mono Accessibility team. If you're an a11y nerd, or your day job is Winforms or Silverlight app development and you want to automate that shit on Windows and Linux, or you just don't believe that I am currently bearded and want to confirm for yourself, please check it out.

I'd also love to talk to people about Snowy, Free web services, GNOME's online desktop strategy, Batman, and the future of Tomboy.

Dark Victory is really good so far. Doesn't stand on its own...you need to read The Long Halloween first (and therefore should read Year One before that).

A few weeks ago I drafted a blog with updates on Snowy, and just ran out of time to finish it up and post it. But there is some basic info I want to share, so here's an updated excerpt:

We are really excited about all of the positive feedback we're hearing about Snowy, and the upcoming Tomboy Online service. We were reluctant to announce the project before we could confidently host it, but based on the excellent feedback and participation we've received so far, it's clear that we did the right thing by announcing early.

The day I blogged about Snowy, I left for San Diego to participate in my friends' wedding. When I returned on Monday, I had a lot of catching up to do! Here are some of the recent happenings:

• Brad set up a Snowy mailing list, and a Snowy product in GNOME bugzilla.
• Og Maciel has begun work on a virtual appliance for Snowy, and in the process of doing so has helped to unearth some bugs (our first mailing list activity). Thanks Og!
• Ryan Paul of Ars Technica fame as written a great article about the current state of Snowy.
• Rodrigo Moya and Stuart Langridge have continued to help us refine our REST API, as they work on implementing it for Ubuntu One. Stuart contributed patches to upgrade our authentication from HTTP basic to OAuth, and I finally pushed it upstream, along with corresponding support in Tomboy (based on some handy dandy code from Bojan Rajkovic). I am really grateful for their help!
• We have our first localization! Thanks to Viatcheslav Ivanov for diving in.
• The Midgard project has implemented our REST API as well, and intends to add support to Conboy (Tomboy ported to C on Maemo) as well.

This is all after less than a week of Snowy "going public"! This is an encouraging sign that we are on the right track with API design and modularity of implementation.

So that is my updated paste from the draft. The rest was all technical details on the design of the API, and how much Rodrigo, Stuart, and Brad all rock, etc etc. I'll post about that soon...for now I'm going to focus on getting a demo server up for you all to play with!

For those to whom I owe a drink, your day of reckoning approaches!

Tomboy Bug Squashing Day: Tuesday June 16th

Everybody!


Some of our beautiful Tomboy contributors have organized a bug and test day on June 16th, 2009. It is officially scheduled for 8AM-5PM PST (3PM-Midnight UTC), but I expect people will be around before and after. :-)

We're going to be focusing on UNCONFIRMED and NEEDSINFO bugs, outstanding patches, and stuff targeted for the current cycle.

If you want to work on patches, that's great, but anybody can help regardless of their background and abilities. Just show up and we'll help you get started contributing by squashing some bugs!

Check out our wiki page for all the details.

If you're starving for Snowy updates, you might want to join our mailing list. I'll be writing more soon about a lot of the exciting happenings with Tomboy's best friend on the web.

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

Tomboy 0.15.1 Release Brings New Online Note Synchronization Preview

"Red Westie", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

On Monday we released Tomboy 0.15.1, the latest development release on the road to 1.0. It features a lot of the same fixes from 0.14.2, and some other improvements:

• Preview of new Web Synchronization add-in
  
• Work around problems on Windows caused by having multiple GTK+ applications modify PATH
  
• Search for phrases by surrounding them with quotes, save the width of the Notebook pane, and other improvements to the search UI
  
• Better HIG compliance in synchronization UIs
  
• All the same fixes from 0.14.2
  
• And much more!

I'd like to talk to you a little bit about this "Web Synchronization" add-in. From a feature perspective, the biggest problem with Tomboy has been how difficult it is to synchronize your notes between multiple computers, and to share your notes with your friends and colleagues. We have note synchronization but it's hard to set up unless you have your own server. You can share notes with Giver, but that has its limitations as well. And how do you view your notes when you're on a device without a Tomboy notes client?

A long time ago I blogged about how great a free "Tomboy Online" web service would be as a fix for these issues, but I never had the time to follow up on it. Until now.

Snowy, Your Tomboy Notes Online

Meet Snowy. Snowy is a project started by Brad Taylor to bring your Tomboy notes online. It's "Tomboy's best friend on the web", as Brad says. Here is what you can expect from Snowy in the coming weeks and months:

• "Tomboy Online" - a free hosted service (running Snowy), where anybody can create an account for securely synchronizing their notes.
  
• Fine-grained privacy settings to let you mark your notes as public, private, or shared with specific friends.
  
• Edit your notes directly in your browser!

Editing notes in Snowy

Brad started Snowy in his spare time, and recently our team at Novell had a Hackweek at our disposal. So last week, Brad and I decided to really get this project off the ground. It is still an extremely new project, but we feel it's far enough along to solicit feedback and contributions from the community. Some basic facts about the project:

• Snowy is AGPL-licensed. I firmly believe that our community needs to step up and start offering competitive AGPL web services. If we want to stay relevant, that is!
  
• Snowy is developed in Python on the Django web framework. Most people who expressed an interest in working on this were most familiar with Python for web apps.
  
• Snowy is developed in GNOME git. If you watch the commits list, you've no doubt seen the recent activity.
  
• Snowy is easy to deploy on your personal server. If you don't want to trust Tomboy Online with your notes, you can still use Snowy to give yourself web access to your notes, or just to provide a more convenient way to synchronize.

Snowy is brand new! I hope in the screenshots you see the potential, but I'm sure you also see how much room there is for improvement.

What works:

• Tomboy<->Snowy note synchronization
  
• Online note-viewing
  
• User registration
  
• Database administration and other fancy Django stuff

Logging in to Snowy

Where we need help:

• Authentication review, OAuth
  
• HTML/CSS/JS to prettify everything
  
• Design and implement all that cool note-sharing stuff
  
• Little features like copying a friend's note into your collection, or downloading/emailing/printing any note straight from your browser
  
• Security audit
  
• Your ideas!

You may be wondering how Snowy and Tomboy communicate for synchronization. I will talk about this more in a future post, but we have designed a REST API for web synchronization. This API is easy to consume from the client end, and easy to implement on the server end. This means we should have no trouble adding sync capabilities to Tomdroid and other Tomboy note clients. It also means that if you don't like Snowy, you can create your own web service that implements the same API, and still use the same web synchronization add-in included in Tomboy.

We still have a lot of work to do to make synchronizing and sharing your Tomboy notes effortless and fun! Outside of Snowy, here are some things we'd like help working on:

• Automatic background synchronization in Tomboy
  
• Web synchronization support in Tomdroid
  
• More features in the web synchronization add-in, like:
  
  • One click to get from your Tomboy note to its Snowy page
    
  • Control your sharing preferences for a note without opening your browser
    
  • Easy access to friends' notes

By the way, if you plan on using Tomboy 0.14.x for a long time, you'll be able to use the Web Synchronization add-in, too! When we launch Tomboy Online, downloads will be available for 0.14.x users on all platforms.

Stay tuned for more updates, and a demo server for everybody to play with!

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Tomboy 0.14.2 Released - 25% Faster Start-Up!

"Running Shep", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

Last week we released Tomboy 0.14.2, a new stable release with a lot of fixes cherry-picked from the development branch. We remedied a couple of crashes, squashed some weird errors and behavior, and we even improved memory usage and start-up performance. Here are the highlights:

• Start Tomboy in 25% less time
  
• Fix random start-up crash on distros like Ubuntu 9.04
  
• Recognize presence of FUSE when built into kernel (not as module)
  
• Fix error when opening New Note Template on Ubuntu 9.04
  
• Stop seeing "this/that/other" as a file link (whoops!)
  
• Don't crash when opening invalid or improperly-formatted notes
  
• Better error-reporting on Windows
  
• Updated cross-platform documentation
  
• Updated translations

This start-up performance fix was also in 0.15.0, but I didn't realize how significant it was until after I'd already announced it. We found that this simple fix saved us around 25% on Tomboy start-up. On my system, start-up time was cut from 4 seconds to 3 seconds (these are warm starts, I did not have time to test cold starts).

These traces were created using Ruben's patch and Federico's graphing tool. You can click them to see the full graphs (note that apps run slower with tracing turned on). Compare the numbers for setting up our AddinManager in 0.14.1...

...versus the new numbers for 0.14.2...

The funny thing is, all I did was change a couple of lines in our Mono.Addins initialization code to reflect the latest recommendations of the maintainer.

This "free" boost isn't even part of the low-hanging fruit I keep talking about when it comes to Tomboy performance optimizations. I'm working on another fix that should cut down on memory consumption, too, and you should expect performance improvements in every release this cycle. If you would like to help us set up an automated way to track memory usage and start-up time in Tomboy, that would be an awesome contribution. :-)

Following the GNOME schedule, our next development release, Tomboy 0.15.1, is scheduled for May 25. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements!

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Tomboy 0.15.0 Development Release Brings New Features and Fixes, Even For 0.14.x Users!

I'm very pleased to announce Tomboy 0.15.0, our first development release on the road to Tomboy 1.0. A few of the improvements in 0.15.0 are:

• New NoteDirectoryWatcher add-in supports editing of your note files in other programs (think Dropbox).
  
• The first of many improvements to start-up time, by not rebuilding the add-in registry every time Tomboy starts. This also fixes start-up bugs on a few distributions, including Windows.
  
• Random start-up crash in GConf fixed.
  
• Many improvements to the printing add-in.
  
• Better note and URL auto-linking.
  
• Console output on Windows command prompts now works correctly, for better error reporting.

See our NEWS file for information on some usability improvements, better GMime support, Mono.Addins upgrade on Windows, and more.

Please visit our download page for source tarballs, Windows installers, and Mac disk images. Note that the Windows installer is still a work-in-progress, and for now you should always uninstall the previous version of Tomboy before installing a new one.

NoteDirectoryWatcher Add-in Available for 0.14.x Users on Linux, Windows, and Mac!

NoteDirectoryWatcher in Action

For years, users in various situations have tried setting up ad-hoc note synchronization solutions by syncing their ~/.tomboy directory between computers. This has never been supported, and because Tomboy would not notice outside changes to note files while it was running, could easily lead to data loss and confusion. Thanks to Mike Fletcher, we are one step closer to supporting this group of users. With this add-in enabled, if another process modifies your note files, Tomboy will notice the change and update appropriately (after a short delay).

The great thing about add-ins is that we can make this feature available for download to all of our 0.14.x users. Source is in git, but you can download this cross-platform binary, drop it in ~/.tomboy/addins/ , enable it in your preferences and try it out! As this is our first release of this feature, bugs are expected, so please report any problems you experience. :-)

Please remember that sharing your ~/.tomboy is still not recommended, because it contains a bunch of add-in metadata that should not be shared unless you have identical set-ups on each system. In an upcoming version of Tomboy, we will be getting rid of ~/.tomboy and following the FreeDesktop XDG specification, so note data and add-in configuration will be stored separately. If you care about our migration from ~/.tomboy to XDG directories, please read my proposal on the bug and leave your comments.

Upcoming Releases

"Droplet", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

Some of the fixes in 0.15.0 will be coming to our next 0.14.x maintenance release: 0.14.2. Expect news about this in a few days.

Our next development release, 0.15.1, should include some new features in note synchronization, better Windows support when multiple GTK+ apps are installed, and the typical assortment of fixes and improvements. We are planning to have a bug day soon where we'll milestone a lot of our outstanding bugs. I'll let you know when we have a date. :-)

Lastly, after the last Tomboy planning meeting, we developed a roadmap for our next stable release, which, pending a few specific improvements, will be versioned 1.0. I'll be writing more about this in the future, but for now, feel free to check it out, and if you are interested in helping, toss your name in there!

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Tomboy Notes on Android: Olivier Bilodeau Releases Tomdroid 0.1.0

During the fall, Olivier showed up on tomboy-list announcing a school project he would be working on: Tomdroid, a Tomboy note reader (and eventually editor) for the Android mobile platform that drives the wonderful G1 phone. After a few months of development, the first "baby-eating" release is available for testing. Olivier mentions a number of nasty little bugs in this first release, but he is already working on fixing them, and people are already starting to poke around with the code and find ways to help.

Tomdroid: Tomboy Notes on Android

Obviously, having access to your Tomboy notes on your mobile phone is a huge win. Even when they are read-only, you can:

• Access your grocery list without having to call your wife (which only proves that you weren't listening in the first place)
  
• Quickly access your notes about obscure system configurations when visiting a client site, instead of googling (ever worked for a client who stood over you shoulder, and wasn't too impressed by your frequent googling?)
  
• For me, I often forget to add contacts and calendar events until I am repeatedly burned, but it's pretty common to have that info floating around in my Tomboy notes.
  
• And the number one win: you can have the schizophrenic dude next to you on the bus review the draft of your latest blog post (this keeps him busy, making it less likely he will stab you in the face)

See? Tomdroid just saved your life.

As a G1 owner, I'm extremely excited about this project. I downloaded the Android SDK just so I could start playing around with the code. Olivier has communicated extensively with us on tomboy-list and in #tomboy, and one of the really nice things he's done is initial work on an XML schema for the Tomboy note format. This will be extremely useful to maintain, as it is inevitable that Tomboy notes will being to be read and edited via interesting new clients.

If you're looking for a fun (because it's Tomboy-related) and hip (because it's mobile) project to work on, I recommend spending some time with Tomdroid. New projects are always fun, for example you could work on tighter integration with phone features (like phone numbers, contacts, calendar, and web), or you can start playing with note editing (maybe a nerdy markdown editor would be a good fit?).

Ideas for getting your notes onto your G1:

• Manually copy ~/.tomboy/*.note to your G1 periodically. Verdict: Lame
  
• Write Tomboy add-in that hooks into HAL, notices when a G1 is connected, offers to push notes to phone (could be a button that appears in the note toolbar, a libnotify bubble, or even a totally automatic process). Verdict: Instant win, minus the requirement to plug in your phone.
  
• Implement Tomboy online service, and corresponding sync functionality in Tomdroid. Verdict: Epic win, may not be ready for a few months.

Pushing your notes to the G1

Those are great ideas. While drafting this post last night I really liked the second one, so here you can download my quick hack job that Gets It Done. Drop Tomdroid.dll into ~/.tomboy/addins, or `make && make install`. Many thanks to James Wilcox for his incredible vision and Aaron Bockover for all the Banshee code I stole to make interacting with HAL devices brain-dead simple. Right now you just get an item in the Tools menu in the note window, but clearly there are better things that could be done. Patches welcome, I'll dump this into git as soon as I get rid of the excess Banshee code I brought in.

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Tomboy 0.14.1, the future, and a word about Gnote

Tomboy 0.14.1 Stable Release for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X

I'm very proud to announce Tomboy 0.14.1, which represents the beginning of our stable support for Tomboy on all major desktop platforms. Here are some of the major changes since the 0.12.x stable versions:

• Tomboy is now fully supported on Windows and Mac OS X
  
• Printing has been rewritten using the Gtk.Print API, fixing many bugs
  
• 25% reduction in memory usage and slightly faster startup
  
• Significant memory savings with very large note collections
  
• Improvements to HTML Export add-in
  
• Improvements in note and URL linking
  
• Many fixes to note synchronization and D-Bus API
  
• Process now named "tomboy", not "Tomboy"
  
• No longer writes to disk every 40 seconds

Searching Notes in Windows

All in all this has been a pretty great cycle for Tomboy. Windows support has been the most-requested Tomboy feature for awhile, and in fact some of my first work on Tomboy three years ago was to make it work at my old Windows-only job. The Windows version has generated interest from a whole new set of users, but most importantly to me, it has gained us several new contributors! Benjamin Podszun, for example, rewrote printing to remove our dependence on the obsolete libgnomeprint, then went on to fix several other bugs and to triage the rest. Since I am not generally a Windows user, it is important to be able to depend on contributors from that world to keep an eye on things.

The Mac port is a little less mature, and we will probably need to get more involved in in the GTK+ implementation on that platform to ensure solid support. Nevertheless, though there are quirks, we are happy to support Tomboy on Mac OS X, too.

Tomboy in your dock (click for full-screen shot)

If you are a GNOME Do user, you may currently be enjoying the wonderful Tomboy plugin, which provides instant access to your notes, and convenient creation of new notes.

Instant note access with GNOME Do

With Tomboy 0.14.1 we have striven to create a solid base on which to build the future of Tomboy. Cross-platform support has given us new contributors and a cleaner code base. We have gotten rid of most of our use of obsolete GNOME APIs. We are off to a great start on profiling and making performance enhancements. Note synchronization is stable on all platforms. Now is the time to make Tomboy really shine.

Looking Forward

For Tomboy 0.16.0, we have a few more fun things planned. The community is having the planning meeting tomorrow, so we'll have our official roadmap soon, but some features I'm currently excited to work on are:

• Automatic note synchronization between Tomboy(s), G1, iPhone, and the web.
  
• Continued improvements to memory usage and overall performance, especially on startup (lots of low-hanging fruit here).
  
• Figuring out how best to integrate with gnome-shell, which currently has no specific plans for applet support (which means it's a great time for us to figure out how to make applets awesome in GNOME 3.0!).

The great thing is that most of this work is easy to do in parallel, so now is a wonderful time to join in the hacking.

An old Tomboy Online mockup, stay tuned for news!

A Note about Gnote

Some people have started asking about Gnote, Hubert Figuiere's line-for-line port of Tomboy to C++. Our stance on Gnote is that it is counterproductive to maintain identical software in two languages. It will be harmful to the community, especially as these two apps inevitably diverge. It will result in duplication of effort, duplication of bugs, and a lot of wasted time for those who are trying to add value to the user experience.

Tomboy is not going away, and it will continue to be developed on the extremely productive Mono/GTK# language platform. Anyone thinking about distributing Gnote should consider the impact on users and their data. When we develop, we should always be asking ourselves, "is this adding value for our users?"

Tomboy has a vibrant community, a happy relationship with GNOME, and an exciting future. If you'd like to help us out come to tomorrow's planning meeting, join us on our mailing list, or just start hacking!

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Tomboy 0.13.5 Brings a Better Windows Installation Experience

Today I released Tomboy 0.13.5. It has a bunch of nice fixes, including updates to Benjamin Podszun's Gtk.Print rewrite of Tomboy's printing add-in (making printing available on all platforms). For Windows users, this is the first time that you should be able to easily install gtk-sharp and Tomboy without having to muck around with your system. But we wouldn't want it to be too easy, so there are some caveats.

From http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Installing/Windows :

Instructions for installing a Tomboy Windows release

Upgrading from Tomboy 0.13.4 or earlier

1. Uninstall Tomboy.
2. Uninstall any existing versions of gtk-sharp you may have installed.
3. Continue with Installation instructions.

Installation

1. Install Novell's gtk-sharp 2.12.8 or newer.
2. Restart.
3. Run Tomboy installer 0.13.5 or newer.
4. Enjoy!

Importing notes from Linux (optional)

1. On your Linux box, copy all of the *.note files out of ~/.tomboy .
2. On your Windows box, quit Tomboy.
3. On your Windows box, copy all the *.note files from Linux into %APPDATA%\tomboy .

Please please please don't hesitate to file bugs for any problems you experience.

Thanks so much to Mike Kestner for working his ass off (on his own time) updating the gtk-sharp installers, making them easier to develop and build, and fixing the issues reported by Tomboy users. Apps like Tomboy, Banshee, and GNOME Do would simply not exist without all of his hard work.

Tomboy 0.13.3, Tomboy 0.12.2, Tasque 0.1.8, and Giver!

There have been some very important Tomboy and Tasque releases in the past month or so that I have neglected to share. I think it's true that Twitter removes a lot of the motivation to blog. Here are the takeaway points:

• Tomboy 0.12.2, an update to the stable series, fixes a nasty bug that could cause notes to be mistakenly deleted during synchronization. Versions of Tomboy affected by this bug are: 0.12.0, 0.12.1, 0.13.0, 0.13.1. If you are using any of these versions, and you like to use sync (or set note contents via the dbus interface), please upgrade now! Note that this was fixed in the unstable series in Tomboy 0.13.2.
• Yesterday I finally made new Windows/Mac builds. You can get binaries for Tomboy 0.13.3 at our download page.
• Last month we released Tasque 0.1.8. It fixes problems communicating with RememberTheMilk.com and a kabillion other bugs. Windows and Mac binaries are available at the download page.
• Ankit Jain has started reviving Giver development. For one thing, he has Windows builds available for download (an obviously useful feature for a file sharing tool).
• I've discovered the best theme for openSUSE: Shiki Colors with the Shiki-Wise color scheme and the GNOME-Colors icon set.
  

Shiki-Colors Theme (click for larger version)

So what else is going on? Tomboy 0.13.3 features some fixes that cut down my memory usage by 25% (with ~200 notes). It should also speed up start-up time if you have a big note collection. One user with 621 notes reported a change from 11 seconds to 4 seconds when he upgraded! The fixes were almost all related to extra work done on a per-note basis, so the memory and performance wins are most significant on these large note collections.

That being said, there is a lot more work to do on memory and performance. Ruben Vermeersch blogged about adapting Federico's timeline tracing tools to chart Tomboy start-up performance. This is going to be extremely helpful in figuring out where we're slowing things down. And as for memory usage, I have only fixed the low-hanging fruit; there are more wins to be had! If this is an area of computer science that you find fun, all help is welcome. :-)

Tomboy Startup (click for full-size graph)

My day job of working on the Mono Accessibility team has kept me pretty busy, and it's been hard lately to find time to work on Tomboy and Tasque. Sure, my team understands when I take a few hours every couple of weeks to prepare a Tomboy release, but that doesn't provide enough time for big feature work or difficult bug fixes. For example, we knew about the problems with Tasque and RememberTheMilk.com for a month before we were able to fix it and get a release out. Fortunately, Novell has its cool "ITO" (Innovation Time On) program. I accumulate 4 hours of ITO every week; that's basically the equivalent of 10% time! As I used up all of my regular time off with hospital visits last year, I scheduled four days of ITO during the week of Christmas. I was able to use that time to review a ton of outstanding patches for Tasque, fix the bugs in the RTM and SQLite backends, and make it easy to build on Windows and Mac OS X. This is also when I did all of the memory fixes for Tomboy. So a big thanks to Novell for supporting me in this work.

Lastly, I'm really excited about Ankit Jain's work on Giver. I never worked on Giver, unless you count the moral support I lent during that first Hackweek. :-) But I am amazed at how many people are asking for updates, Windows and Mac versions, etc. As somebody who works from home, Giver isn't that useful to me, but apparently it is very popular and more people are learning about it every day. With Ankit's help, this project may not be so dead after all. You can help him out by testing his Windows builds, trying latest SVN, filing issues, and hanging out in #giver on GIMPNet.