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 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.

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

Tomboy needs your help!

I just mailed tomboy-list to let everybody know that I won't be around to help much this release cycle (stupid real world!). The big bummer here is that I won't be able to work on automatic background synchronization, which Tomboy really needs to bring sync to the level of AWESOME.

So, as I said in my email, if you've been waiting for the perfect moment to dive in and be a free software hero, then now is your chance. Mess with the wiki page I linked above, send in patches, draw mockups...do whatever it is that you do so well! I'll help by reviewing patches and doing whatever polish/integration work I can do in January before the UI/string freezes.

Oh, and keep in mind that we're still looking for a hero to revamp our tagging UI, too.

With your help, Tomboy sync in 0.10.0 will be legen-

...wait for it...

-dary!

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. :-)

Tomboy 0.7.2 Released!

This is the first release that I've done myself, so it's extra special to me. ;-) Aside from bug fixes and patches from the community, cool new stuff includes the transition from a custom plugin infrastructure to Mono.Addins, and Boyd's Tasks addin that adds task integration to Tomboy.

Now I just need to get tomboy-sync stabilized, so it can go into the next release...

Tomboy Note Synchronization

I got back from Provo on Saturday, after spending three days and about 45 hours hacking on Tomboy note synchronization with Boyd during the last half of Novell's Hack Week. I'm down to about 7 hours of time off left at my real job, but damn was it worth it! For those interested, below is the email I sent to the tomboy-list, peppered with a few related hyperlinks.

Hi Tomboy fans,

As you may have seen on Boyd's blog, I visited Boyd at Novell HQ
in Provo to help work on Tomboy Synchronization during Novell's Hack
Week. We made awesome progress, and we feel pretty confident that
sync will go into the next stable release. I've broken this update
into the following sections:

1. What is Tomboy synchronization?
2. What can I expect to see in the next release?
3. Technical details
4. What about Conduit, etc?
5. What about note sharing?


1. What is Tomboy synchronization?

With the Tomboy synchronization feature, we aim to solve a very
specific user problem: one person running Tomboy on multiple computers
who wants to keep all their notes in sync. It is very common for a
user to have (for example) a desktop and a laptop, with no obvious way
to move notes back and forth between them. Our solution is providing
100% note data synchronization between these computers.

We know some people are interested in more sophisticated sync
scenarios, like two users syncing a subset of their notes. This is
certainly doable, and the work we've done on sync would allow this to
happen via an external app, but there are currently no plans to add
these advanced sync features to Tomboy 0.8.0.


2. What can I expect to see in the next release?

If you watch Boyd's demo and check out the screen shots, that's a
pretty good indication of what we plan to deliver. You will be able
to synchronize all of your notes via a central shared location. This
location may be an SSH share, a WebDAV share, or *any* mount point on
your local file system.

We will provide extremely simple support for conflict resolution
during sync. Conflicts include modifications to the same note on
different computers, creating different notes with the same title on
different computers, etc. Our current solution here is to prompt the
user to either delete or rename the local version of the note. Any
ideas on how to make this is as brain-dead easy as possible would be
appreciated! :-)


3. Technical details

All syncing is actually done via local mount points. In the cases of
WebDAV and SSH shares, we utilize FUSE filesystems (wdfs and sshfs,
respectively) to mount the shares locally. We then use the same sync
backend to perform filesystem operations for sync. FUSE support is
detected at run time.

We will be writing up more details about our sync implementation as
soon as we get a chance. For now, feel free to play with the code in
the tomboy-sync branch (though of course back up your notes before
trying sync, as it's not bug-free yet).


4. What about Conduit, etc?

Conduit is a cool program that helps you sync between various
different applications and web services. It has support for Tomboy,
allowing you to sync between Tomboy and Evolution, GMail, BackpackIt,
and other apps/services. So why aren't we just throwing out support
behind Conduit (or another sync framework)?

Basically, we felt that Tomboy note synchronization is a must-have
feature for 0.8.0, and Conduit is still new and we haven't had much
time to test it. We wanted our users to have a sync solution that had
no risk of data loss (which can happen when a note moves to an
application or web service that is not aware of Tomboy-specific
features), and we wanted it to work right out of the box.

That being said, Conduit is an awesome project, and the work we have
done (which includes patches from the Conduit team!) will enable
Tomboy to work even better when syncing via Conduit. So our users
will have the option of a more advanced sync solution with Conduit if
that interests them.


5. What about note sharing?

Some of you may be thinking "I only have one computer...I don't care
about sync, I care about sharing my Tomboy notes with my friends!"
Well, this isn't something we're adding natively to 0.8.0, but the
work we've done for synchronization makes sharing a much easier
problem to solve. In fact, we now have support for easily sharing
notes to friends on a local network with Giver, another cool
Hack Week project. The interaction here is so incredible...I wish my
computer was powerful enough to record a demo of how awesome it is.
You just drag a note to your friend's face in Giver, and when they
accept the note it just pops up as a new note in their Tomboy! It's
super cool.


Well that's everything. We'll send out more updates as sync
progresses. Remember, if you try out the code in the tomboy-sync
branch, BACK UP YOUR NOTES FIRST. We will bring the code over to
Tomboy trunk as soon as we feel comfortable trusting everyone's notes
to it.

We really look forward to hearing any ideas our users or developers
might have for making Tomboy Synchronization really rock! If you're
interested in hacking on this (there is still some work to do), let us
know. We will put up some technical documentation on our sync
implementation as soon as we get a chance to write it. ;-)

Best,
Sandy