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!