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.

Even fantasy authors aren't fooled!

Steven Brust uses Ubuntu. But then again, he's a cheap bastard and former programmer, so maybe it's silly for me to get all warm and fuzzy about this?

Feeling Feisty?

About 14 months ago I switched to Ubuntu Linux (from Gentoo). It's been a good ride. Dapper Drake was awesome (my mom still uses it), Edgy Eft was a good upgrade, and now the Feisty Fawn has arrived.

Cool stuff:

• New Tomboy ;-)
• Installer offers to migrate settings from Windows, if you have it installed.
  
• Fresh install. Double-click latest Naruto ep. Totem opens, tells me it can't decode divx/xvid/whatever, but it thinks I should install some codec packages, and after clicking OK a few times the packages are installed and the video starts playing. I didn't have to restart Totem (or my machine, of course) or even press the play button again. It was awesome.
• Similarly, getting desktop effects and proprietary video drivers going was just a few clicks; no manually editing configuration files. Of course, this doesn't change the fact that my video card is too slow for such things.
• Feels faster.
• All the other great improvements moving from GNOME 2.16 -> 2.18.
  
• Magnatune and Jamendo available directly from Rhythmbox. That means free access to ~35,000 streaming tunes.
• Lots of French hip hop available from Jamendo.

Uncool stuff:

• Migration assistant didn't offer to bring over my Firefox settings from Windows. I had to do it manually. :-(
• When I tried to play MP3s and AACs from Rhythmbox it just errored out. It should be as friendly as totem. I had to install -good, -bad, and -ugly all on my own.
• Jamendo and Magnatune won't work right now for some reason...must be camera shy, since I only brought up Rhythmbox to take a screenshot.
  
• Buying tunes from Magnatune requires too many steps and interaction with three separate apps.
  
• Lots of French hip hop available from Jamendo. ;-)

Token boring screenshot:

Token spinning cube screenshot:

The Bullets of My Life

(not a whiny post about my job)

• Google Summer of Code 2007 has opened for applications! Of course, GNOME is participating this year. If we get any good proposals for Tomboy, I'll be mentoring, which is pretty cool.
• I wrote the draft for the "History" page for the new GNOME website. Of course, it won't go up for a month or so. For some reason it took me like 2 weeks to crank out a couple of straight-forward paragraphs. I really need to practice writing more...
• Although I haven't done any huge Tomboy work, I've done a bunch of little things that have been eating into the time I should be spending doing the refactoring I announced a month ago. Unfortunately I can only really spend about 8 solid hours per week on Tomboy. :-( But, I documented my work, and hopefully I'll get some feedback so I can start moving things into the main code base. Followed soon after by WORLD DOMINATION (well, no, just better Windows support, but still!).
• Guys and gals, I added this "Shared Items" thingy to my blog, and you should check it out! When I'm in Google Reader, if I see something I think should be shared with the world (often it's not even geeky programmer stuff), I click the little "Share" button and it shows up in this widget on my blog. So you should check it out from time to time!
• Yes! Exclamation points are definitely "in"! (so is putting punctuation where it should logically go: outside the quotation marks, unless you're quoting the punctuation!).
• Ack! Almost forgot! GNOME 2.18 was released yesterday, so now I'm jonesin' to upgrade my Ubuntu installation to the beta of Feisty (whenever it comes out...).
• I'm a little peeved that "refactor" and its various permutations are not recognized by most spell-checkers as words. I mean, shouldn't spell-checkers in geeky programs like Firefox and blogger include words like that? Incidentally, "blogger" is in blogger's dictionary, but not Firefox's.