Tomboy Bug Squashing Day: Tuesday June 16th

Everybody!


Some of our beautiful Tomboy contributors have organized a bug and test day on June 16th, 2009. It is officially scheduled for 8AM-5PM PST (3PM-Midnight UTC), but I expect people will be around before and after. :-)

We're going to be focusing on UNCONFIRMED and NEEDSINFO bugs, outstanding patches, and stuff targeted for the current cycle.

If you want to work on patches, that's great, but anybody can help regardless of their background and abilities. Just show up and we'll help you get started contributing by squashing some bugs!

Check out our wiki page for all the details.

If you're starving for Snowy updates, you might want to join our mailing list. I'll be writing more soon about a lot of the exciting happenings with Tomboy's best friend on the web.

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Tomboy 0.15.1 Release Brings New Online Note Synchronization Preview

"Red Westie", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

On Monday we released Tomboy 0.15.1, the latest development release on the road to 1.0. It features a lot of the same fixes from 0.14.2, and some other improvements:

• Preview of new Web Synchronization add-in
  
• Work around problems on Windows caused by having multiple GTK+ applications modify PATH
  
• Search for phrases by surrounding them with quotes, save the width of the Notebook pane, and other improvements to the search UI
  
• Better HIG compliance in synchronization UIs
  
• All the same fixes from 0.14.2
  
• And much more!

I'd like to talk to you a little bit about this "Web Synchronization" add-in. From a feature perspective, the biggest problem with Tomboy has been how difficult it is to synchronize your notes between multiple computers, and to share your notes with your friends and colleagues. We have note synchronization but it's hard to set up unless you have your own server. You can share notes with Giver, but that has its limitations as well. And how do you view your notes when you're on a device without a Tomboy notes client?

A long time ago I blogged about how great a free "Tomboy Online" web service would be as a fix for these issues, but I never had the time to follow up on it. Until now.

Snowy, Your Tomboy Notes Online

Meet Snowy. Snowy is a project started by Brad Taylor to bring your Tomboy notes online. It's "Tomboy's best friend on the web", as Brad says. Here is what you can expect from Snowy in the coming weeks and months:

• "Tomboy Online" - a free hosted service (running Snowy), where anybody can create an account for securely synchronizing their notes.
  
• Fine-grained privacy settings to let you mark your notes as public, private, or shared with specific friends.
  
• Edit your notes directly in your browser!

Editing notes in Snowy

Brad started Snowy in his spare time, and recently our team at Novell had a Hackweek at our disposal. So last week, Brad and I decided to really get this project off the ground. It is still an extremely new project, but we feel it's far enough along to solicit feedback and contributions from the community. Some basic facts about the project:

• Snowy is AGPL-licensed. I firmly believe that our community needs to step up and start offering competitive AGPL web services. If we want to stay relevant, that is!
  
• Snowy is developed in Python on the Django web framework. Most people who expressed an interest in working on this were most familiar with Python for web apps.
  
• Snowy is developed in GNOME git. If you watch the commits list, you've no doubt seen the recent activity.
  
• Snowy is easy to deploy on your personal server. If you don't want to trust Tomboy Online with your notes, you can still use Snowy to give yourself web access to your notes, or just to provide a more convenient way to synchronize.

Snowy is brand new! I hope in the screenshots you see the potential, but I'm sure you also see how much room there is for improvement.

What works:

• Tomboy<->Snowy note synchronization
  
• Online note-viewing
  
• User registration
  
• Database administration and other fancy Django stuff

Logging in to Snowy

Where we need help:

• Authentication review, OAuth
  
• HTML/CSS/JS to prettify everything
  
• Design and implement all that cool note-sharing stuff
  
• Little features like copying a friend's note into your collection, or downloading/emailing/printing any note straight from your browser
  
• Security audit
  
• Your ideas!

You may be wondering how Snowy and Tomboy communicate for synchronization. I will talk about this more in a future post, but we have designed a REST API for web synchronization. This API is easy to consume from the client end, and easy to implement on the server end. This means we should have no trouble adding sync capabilities to Tomdroid and other Tomboy note clients. It also means that if you don't like Snowy, you can create your own web service that implements the same API, and still use the same web synchronization add-in included in Tomboy.

We still have a lot of work to do to make synchronizing and sharing your Tomboy notes effortless and fun! Outside of Snowy, here are some things we'd like help working on:

• Automatic background synchronization in Tomboy
  
• Web synchronization support in Tomdroid
  
• More features in the web synchronization add-in, like:
  
  • One click to get from your Tomboy note to its Snowy page
    
  • Control your sharing preferences for a note without opening your browser
    
  • Easy access to friends' notes

By the way, if you plan on using Tomboy 0.14.x for a long time, you'll be able to use the Web Synchronization add-in, too! When we launch Tomboy Online, downloads will be available for 0.14.x users on all platforms.

Stay tuned for more updates, and a demo server for everybody to play with!

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Tomboy 0.14.2 Released - 25% Faster Start-Up!

"Running Shep", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

Last week we released Tomboy 0.14.2, a new stable release with a lot of fixes cherry-picked from the development branch. We remedied a couple of crashes, squashed some weird errors and behavior, and we even improved memory usage and start-up performance. Here are the highlights:

• Start Tomboy in 25% less time
  
• Fix random start-up crash on distros like Ubuntu 9.04
  
• Recognize presence of FUSE when built into kernel (not as module)
  
• Fix error when opening New Note Template on Ubuntu 9.04
  
• Stop seeing "this/that/other" as a file link (whoops!)
  
• Don't crash when opening invalid or improperly-formatted notes
  
• Better error-reporting on Windows
  
• Updated cross-platform documentation
  
• Updated translations

This start-up performance fix was also in 0.15.0, but I didn't realize how significant it was until after I'd already announced it. We found that this simple fix saved us around 25% on Tomboy start-up. On my system, start-up time was cut from 4 seconds to 3 seconds (these are warm starts, I did not have time to test cold starts).

These traces were created using Ruben's patch and Federico's graphing tool. You can click them to see the full graphs (note that apps run slower with tracing turned on). Compare the numbers for setting up our AddinManager in 0.14.1...

...versus the new numbers for 0.14.2...

The funny thing is, all I did was change a couple of lines in our Mono.Addins initialization code to reflect the latest recommendations of the maintainer.

This "free" boost isn't even part of the low-hanging fruit I keep talking about when it comes to Tomboy performance optimizations. I'm working on another fix that should cut down on memory consumption, too, and you should expect performance improvements in every release this cycle. If you would like to help us set up an automated way to track memory usage and start-up time in Tomboy, that would be an awesome contribution. :-)

Following the GNOME schedule, our next development release, Tomboy 0.15.1, is scheduled for May 25. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements!

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Tomboy 0.15.0 Development Release Brings New Features and Fixes, Even For 0.14.x Users!

I'm very pleased to announce Tomboy 0.15.0, our first development release on the road to Tomboy 1.0. A few of the improvements in 0.15.0 are:

• New NoteDirectoryWatcher add-in supports editing of your note files in other programs (think Dropbox).
  
• The first of many improvements to start-up time, by not rebuilding the add-in registry every time Tomboy starts. This also fixes start-up bugs on a few distributions, including Windows.
  
• Random start-up crash in GConf fixed.
  
• Many improvements to the printing add-in.
  
• Better note and URL auto-linking.
  
• Console output on Windows command prompts now works correctly, for better error reporting.

See our NEWS file for information on some usability improvements, better GMime support, Mono.Addins upgrade on Windows, and more.

Please visit our download page for source tarballs, Windows installers, and Mac disk images. Note that the Windows installer is still a work-in-progress, and for now you should always uninstall the previous version of Tomboy before installing a new one.

NoteDirectoryWatcher Add-in Available for 0.14.x Users on Linux, Windows, and Mac!

NoteDirectoryWatcher in Action

For years, users in various situations have tried setting up ad-hoc note synchronization solutions by syncing their ~/.tomboy directory between computers. This has never been supported, and because Tomboy would not notice outside changes to note files while it was running, could easily lead to data loss and confusion. Thanks to Mike Fletcher, we are one step closer to supporting this group of users. With this add-in enabled, if another process modifies your note files, Tomboy will notice the change and update appropriately (after a short delay).

The great thing about add-ins is that we can make this feature available for download to all of our 0.14.x users. Source is in git, but you can download this cross-platform binary, drop it in ~/.tomboy/addins/ , enable it in your preferences and try it out! As this is our first release of this feature, bugs are expected, so please report any problems you experience. :-)

Please remember that sharing your ~/.tomboy is still not recommended, because it contains a bunch of add-in metadata that should not be shared unless you have identical set-ups on each system. In an upcoming version of Tomboy, we will be getting rid of ~/.tomboy and following the FreeDesktop XDG specification, so note data and add-in configuration will be stored separately. If you care about our migration from ~/.tomboy to XDG directories, please read my proposal on the bug and leave your comments.

Upcoming Releases

"Droplet", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

Some of the fixes in 0.15.0 will be coming to our next 0.14.x maintenance release: 0.14.2. Expect news about this in a few days.

Our next development release, 0.15.1, should include some new features in note synchronization, better Windows support when multiple GTK+ apps are installed, and the typical assortment of fixes and improvements. We are planning to have a bug day soon where we'll milestone a lot of our outstanding bugs. I'll let you know when we have a date. :-)

Lastly, after the last Tomboy planning meeting, we developed a roadmap for our next stable release, which, pending a few specific improvements, will be versioned 1.0. I'll be writing more about this in the future, but for now, feel free to check it out, and if you are interested in helping, toss your name in there!

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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.

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Tomboy 0.14.1, the future, and a word about Gnote

Tomboy 0.14.1 Stable Release for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X

I'm very proud to announce Tomboy 0.14.1, which represents the beginning of our stable support for Tomboy on all major desktop platforms. Here are some of the major changes since the 0.12.x stable versions:

• Tomboy is now fully supported on Windows and Mac OS X
  
• Printing has been rewritten using the Gtk.Print API, fixing many bugs
  
• 25% reduction in memory usage and slightly faster startup
  
• Significant memory savings with very large note collections
  
• Improvements to HTML Export add-in
  
• Improvements in note and URL linking
  
• Many fixes to note synchronization and D-Bus API
  
• Process now named "tomboy", not "Tomboy"
  
• No longer writes to disk every 40 seconds

Searching Notes in Windows

All in all this has been a pretty great cycle for Tomboy. Windows support has been the most-requested Tomboy feature for awhile, and in fact some of my first work on Tomboy three years ago was to make it work at my old Windows-only job. The Windows version has generated interest from a whole new set of users, but most importantly to me, it has gained us several new contributors! Benjamin Podszun, for example, rewrote printing to remove our dependence on the obsolete libgnomeprint, then went on to fix several other bugs and to triage the rest. Since I am not generally a Windows user, it is important to be able to depend on contributors from that world to keep an eye on things.

The Mac port is a little less mature, and we will probably need to get more involved in in the GTK+ implementation on that platform to ensure solid support. Nevertheless, though there are quirks, we are happy to support Tomboy on Mac OS X, too.

Tomboy in your dock (click for full-screen shot)

If you are a GNOME Do user, you may currently be enjoying the wonderful Tomboy plugin, which provides instant access to your notes, and convenient creation of new notes.

Instant note access with GNOME Do

With Tomboy 0.14.1 we have striven to create a solid base on which to build the future of Tomboy. Cross-platform support has given us new contributors and a cleaner code base. We have gotten rid of most of our use of obsolete GNOME APIs. We are off to a great start on profiling and making performance enhancements. Note synchronization is stable on all platforms. Now is the time to make Tomboy really shine.

Looking Forward

For Tomboy 0.16.0, we have a few more fun things planned. The community is having the planning meeting tomorrow, so we'll have our official roadmap soon, but some features I'm currently excited to work on are:

• Automatic note synchronization between Tomboy(s), G1, iPhone, and the web.
  
• Continued improvements to memory usage and overall performance, especially on startup (lots of low-hanging fruit here).
  
• Figuring out how best to integrate with gnome-shell, which currently has no specific plans for applet support (which means it's a great time for us to figure out how to make applets awesome in GNOME 3.0!).

The great thing is that most of this work is easy to do in parallel, so now is a wonderful time to join in the hacking.

An old Tomboy Online mockup, stay tuned for news!

A Note about Gnote

Some people have started asking about Gnote, Hubert Figuiere's line-for-line port of Tomboy to C++. Our stance on Gnote is that it is counterproductive to maintain identical software in two languages. It will be harmful to the community, especially as these two apps inevitably diverge. It will result in duplication of effort, duplication of bugs, and a lot of wasted time for those who are trying to add value to the user experience.

Tomboy is not going away, and it will continue to be developed on the extremely productive Mono/GTK# language platform. Anyone thinking about distributing Gnote should consider the impact on users and their data. When we develop, we should always be asking ourselves, "is this adding value for our users?"

Tomboy has a vibrant community, a happy relationship with GNOME, and an exciting future. If you'd like to help us out come to tomorrow's planning meeting, join us on our mailing list, or just start hacking!

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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.