Monday, February 16, 2009

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.

14 comments:

Andrew said...

Any plans for other synchronization methods? Having Tomboy on Windows is great, but having it synchronize with my home computer would be top-notch.

Anything I can do to help debug/test, let me know.

Sandy said...

@Andrew: Ideally we could provide a web service users could sync with, and it would work on all platforms. I cannot predict the timeframe for this.

In the meantime, there is a fuse-like system for Windows with a sshfs filesystem:

http://dokan-dev.net/en/download/#sshfs

I haven't tried it yet, but have heard some positive feedback from users. You could try manually mounting your share using Dokan SSHFS, then use Tomboy's local file sync backend to point to your mounted share.

I'd really like to be able to recommend this approach, or even write a Windows-only addin that automates the use of Dokan SSHFS, but I haven't had time to verify that it works as well as FUSE SSHFS on Linux/Mac.

Anonymous said...

I love the fact that Tomboy is cross-platform, and I'm including it in today's links post. But I have to let you know, when I clicked on the link in Epiphany to get to the post (I saw it on Planet GNOME) it tried to send me to a comments page. Which is weird, because Planet GNOME itself has a working link, but I wanted to let you know it was happening.

Sandy said...

@bostonpeng: The title of each blog post is itself a link. In this case:

http://automorphic.blogspot.com/2009/02/tomboy-0135-brings-better-windows.html

Marsh said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Marsh said...

Does anyone have any idea what to do the get the
LaTeX plugin
working?

I'm running Windows XP Pro. From a CMD window, I can issue a "latex" command and "convert(ImageMagick)" just as the documentation for the plugin says. I copied the dll file (version 0.5) and pasted it in my G:\Programs\Tomboy folder (I use G: for applications). I then started Tomboy, went to preferences, and turned on the LaTeX plugin. So far, so good.

In a new note I typed: \[\delta\\]
and then pressed return. A command window opened, and latex ran for a short while. But the note still showed the unformated LaTeX code rather than a delta.

Any ideas?

Sandy said...

@marsh: Looking briefly at the source for the Latex plugin, I'd say you need to make sure you have latex, dvips, and convert in your PATH (however that works in Windows). I don't know anything about Latex so maybe you can ask the author of that addin if he knows how to make it work in Windows.

Marsh said...

Hi Sandy,

I did some more investigation. First, today I'm working on an iMac. I installed your version of Tomboy, and it seemed to be working fine.

Then I put the Latex.dll in the Tomboy directory with the other add-in dlls. Tomboy seemed to work, but when I put a LaTeX expression in a note, the app crashed.

So now I went to the shell and ran Tomboy from a shell prompt. The LaTeX addin worked!

Then I went back to the windowed user interface and got the same old. Tomboy crashes when I try to use LaTex.

Do you know if OS X uses two different PATH variables, one in the shell and one for the GUI? This seems to be the most likely explanation.

Sandy said...

@Marsh: Good detective work, the environment is somewhat different when you launch the .app. Could you please post this to the tomboy list or file a bug in bugzilla so that I can see if it's something we can fix? I always lose track of issues that only exist in blog comments. :-) Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Andrew: I use dropbox for that. It's multiplatform as well. Just place your notes in the dropbox and everything will work perfectly :)

Andrew said...

Anders: Thanks for the tip; I will definitely check Dropbox out. Does it synchronize Tomboy <--> Dropbox automatically or does it require you to copy the items back and forth manually? Either way is fine, I just want to know. :)

Sandy said...

As I've mentioned in the past, Dropbox is not a very safe sync method. If you just sync your ~/.tomboy directly, it will not work correctly unless you restart Tomboy all the time. Alternatively, you could use the folder sync addin and point into your dropbox, but if you sync too quickly on one computer after syncing on the other, dropbox may not have done *its* sync yet, and everything could get confused.

So, if you do use dropbox, make sure to use it in conjunction with the folder sync addin in Tomboy, and make sure to wait a bit in between syncs.

Unknown said...

Do you know of a way to sync TomBoy with my BlackBerry's notes? This would be a awesome feature.

Anonymous said...

hi my friend code is 0887 9446 4867