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.

Touching Banshee, Porting Tasque

Toward a more clickable Banshee

I've written on a patch to make the artist and album text in the Banshee track info display interactive. 95% of the time I am listening to my library on shuffle, and sometimes I hear a song and decide I want to hear more from that artist or album. Well, with my patch, you can click on either to perform a search on your library.



You can also right-click and add the album or all tracks by the artist right to the play queue, which is my favorite Banshee trick now. Have you ever used the Banshee Play Queue? It's really cool...if you're listening on shuffle and you add a bunch of stuff to the play queue, it will play those items in order and then go back to shuffling through your library (or whatever you were listening to before you shoved stuff into the queue).



Click to see low-quality demo on YouTube.

So why is this still just a patch and not in Banshee SVN? Well, really, it's kind of ugly, don't you think? Here's this pretty Banshee UI with some gross hyperlink-looking text in the middle of it. What do you folks think I should do?

• Use a different color, like "Selected"?


• Only change the text color on hover?


• Both?

The only thing I like right now about having it colored all the time is that it makes the feature more discoverable. But is it worth it? Any thoughts on the appearance or behavior of this feature? If you build Banshee from SVN, give it a try and see what you think!

I'm busy lately so if somebody else wants to mess with this bug, be my guest. It won't get into SVN until after Banshee 1.4 is released, anyway. ;-)


Tasque Goes Cross-Platform

I couldn't sleep Thursday night, so I yanked some of my code from tomboy-portable2 and got Tasque going on Windows. Then I decided Tasque is simple enough to play with that I'd better get it going on Mac OS X, too. This weekend I even put together I nice little disk image for Mac users. Big thanks to Eoin Hennessy for creating Mono bindings to Immendio's Mac/GTK+ integration library. The next Tasque release will be equally supported on Linux, Windows, and Mac, so feel free to start filing bugs.





Really this is just an excuse to try stuff out for Tomboy.

Tomboy 0.12.0 Released

Yesterday I unleashed the latest stable Tomboy release. This has been a less active cycle than usual, but in 0.12.0 you can experience the wonder of:

• New Tasque add-in


• Add "New notebook..." menu item to Notebook toolbar button


• Many fixes to note synchronization


• Improvements to Bugzilla and HTML Export add-ins


• Tray icon ported to Gtk.StatusIcon


• Support for --debug, --trace, and --profile when running Tomboy

The following contributors were especially helpful in making Tomboy 0.12.0 happen: Boyd Timothy, Alex Graveley, Alexey Nedilko, John Anderson, John Carr, Jon Lund Steffensen, Łukasz Jernaś, Romain Tartiere, Sebastian Dröge, Stefan Cosma, and Stefan Schweizer. A big thank you to them, and to our hard-working translators, too!

The lack of activity during the 0.11.x cycle has disturbed me (especially because it's mostly my fault!), and I've written to our mailing list about how I think we can do better this cycle. One easy way you can help is by voting for your "favorite" Tomboy bugs.

I'll write more about plans for our next stable release after we have our dev meeting, but you can be sure that I haven't forgotten our proprietary compatriots. I'll be merging the tomboy-portable2 branch into trunk Real Soon Now.

Minor releases: Tomboy 0.11.2 and Tasque 0.1.7

Hi everybody! Today I made two minor software releases:

Tomboy 0.11.2 features build fixes, a fixed crasher or two, and improved HTML Export functionality.

Tasque 0.1.7 makes translations actually work, and adds cool tooltips to tasks that show associated notes.

Due to time constraints, these releases do not have any silly names attached to them. I'll make up for this next time. ;-)

Tasque 0.1.6 Released

Yesterday I released Tasque 0.1.6 to a legion of hungry Linux users. I can't believe it's been three months since 0.1.5 was released! You can expect to see 0.1.7 a lot quicker, especially because there are some good patches in bugzilla that just need a bit of review.

As you might expect, Tasque 0.1.6 is our best release yet. There's a new task entry widget at the top of the main window, and due dates are parsed right out of the task text. Plus, there are the usual handful of bug fixes, including a few crashers.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Busy busy busy

If you've been desperately waiting for my weekly UIA status update, I'm sad to report that I'll no longer be posting those. You can track the team's progress via the development schedule page on the wiki. Never fear, if I have something interesting to share, I will make sure to post for you!

I've started helping out with Tasque maintenance, so I triaged a bunch of bugs and applied some patches. I think we'll be ready for a new release soon. I like working on Tasque; it's a fun project.

I installed openSUSE 11 Beta 3 in a VM last week. It's looking pretty good! The new intlclock applet is very cute with its weather integration. In openSUSE 10.3, I struggled a lot with package management...YaST's GTK+ interface was easy to use but crashed a lot, zypper had a very nice CLI but was ridiculously slow, and I ended up using the ncurses YaST UI, and leaving it up all day so that I could avoid the slow repository updates. In openSUSE 11, things are worlds better:

• Zypper is wicked fast, and is now my favorite way to manage packages. All it lacks is tab-completion of package names, but running `zypper se somepackage` is so fast that I don't mind too much. ;-)
• YaST's GTK+ interface has been updated to GTK2 (so it fits in with the rest of my desktop), no longer pops up a kabillion windows when you install packages (so I can, you know, use my computer while I install stuff), and seems really stable. I found some usability problems, but Sunday I wrote a patch and this morning Michael Meeks committed a modified version of it. YaST's GTK+ code was really easy to follow, by the way, considering I'd never looked at it before. Kudos to the YaST team!
  

I hope Firefox is better on openSUSE 11. Maybe it's just my crufty 10.3 install, but I've always had freezing/crashing issues with FF2 and FF3. It seems to be running fine in my openSUSE 11 VM, so I'll keep my fingers crossed. Looking forward to doing a clean install of openSUSE 11 on my main machine soon.

Oh and by the way, I'd like to toss out a quick immature Fuck You to Blogger for never auto-saving my posts, constantly crashing Firefox this morning, and having some weird display problem where the "Compose New Post" page has teeny tiny fonts. I guess I shouldn't care too much about the display of the page, since I apparently can't use it to write posts anymore. Normally FF3 restores the contents of text boxes after a crash, but for whatever reason this is not supported by Blogger. Hooray for using Tomboy as a text editor. :-/

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