Re: Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone)
 

conny I have a feature request, to do with syncing.

I already have a sync setup working using unison, but it would be much easier if we could set the folder where the notes are stored as a config item, and if conboy could read notes in several folders in that location. That would allow us to sync the tomboy backups easily.

As it is, there's a complicated series of hoops to jump through involving a unionfs and unison setup with symbolic links.

Is conboy written in python? If so, I could help with development. If not, is there anything else I can do to help?

Re: Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone)
 

The request to be able to configure the directory where Conboy stores it notes has been there before. The problem is, that if we make the directory user configurable, the backup application on the tablets will not be able to find the notes. So backup will break. Because of this, I'm very careful about this request :)

Hmm, that's bad, I was hoping that sym links should solve this problem easily. Unfortunately I've never tried unionfs.

Conboy is written in C, but using C together with glib/Gtk is not that hard, maybe you want to give it a try?

Now, about the sync stuff. The 0.6-alpha version already contain support for the upcoming http://tomboy-online.org. Personally I think that's the way to go, so I'm putting my energy into that right now.

I could abstract the sync stuff a bit more and make it extensible with plugins, but I'll only do that if there is serious interest of someone who wants to implement different sync methods. For the unionfs problem, I think it would be best to implement a simple directory sync which syncs /home/user/.conboy/ with a other user configurable directory. This would also bring the benefit of conflict handling etc...

What do you think?

Re: Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone)
 

Hi,

version 0.6.0-alpha8 in extras-devel is now more or less usable. I fixed all major crashers so it would be great if some of you could give it a try. But please first take a backup of your notes!

This version may not look like a lot has changed, but in fact almost the complete backend was rewritten. So it might be that there are regressions with even very simple things. No need to report them to bugzilla, just drop a short comment here.

Main changes since 0.5.x:
- Much of the backend rewritten
- Support for plugins
- Support for synchronization to Snowy
- New navigation. There is only one note window and the navigation works like in a browser with back/forward buttons.

Known issues:
- Conboy crashes when the Midgard plugin is selected. This plugin is just not finished yet.
- The settings UI under Diablo is quite ugly.
- Sync only works if you set up your own Snowy installation, because Snowy is not yet released :/

Anyways, I hope to get this version quickly into production. So please help me find the show stoppers!

Thanks!!!

Re: Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone)
 

Awesome work on the snowy plugin! I'll put up a free snowy install for us all to use in the next few days.

I'm not ready to dive into C yet, but once I've done some development on bigger python projects I'll come back and dive in. For now I'll help out by testing and anything else I can think of.

Re: Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone)
 

That's great and for testing this would really be cool. But don't get your hopes too high. I don't think Snowy is ready for production yet. There might be problems with security etc. Still it would be awesome for testing because then more people could try it and I'm sure my code needs a lot of testing ;)

Sure, that's great too. Just tell me if you want to give it a try :) If you have problems with the Snowy install, just tell me or ask directly on the Snowy mailing list. They are nice people there.

Re: Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone)
 

I just uploaded Alpha9 to the autobuilder. And, in order to get more testers*, I added a nice new feature:
Autolinking of various URLs :)

So now if you write stuff like:
- http://bla
- ftp://blabla
- www.xzy.de
- ftp.bla.bl
- ich@home.com
- /home/user/MyDocs/document.txt

and some more. The text is automatically converted into a link and upon clicking this link a hopefully useful application opens.

So far so good, now I really must start to pack my stuff for the summit. I gotta run :)



* And because Quim asked so humble for it here: http://maemo.org/packages/package_in...l/conboy/0.5.5

Re: Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone)
 

I really appreciate your efforts with this applications that I find very useful. However, I do hope sincerely that this doesn't mean that the local syncing will not be maintained and further developed.

I know there are many people with their head in a/the cloud that think (or could it be that it's what they don't do?) that's it is perfectly fine in general to put their most personal information on some unknowns server in an uknown place maintained by whoever.

I don't think so myself, and having the capacity to store a lot of information locally on my Maemo device is a major attractive feature. So you can at least count one user who just see Snowy (I guess that has something to do with "cloud") as a deviation from an otherwise very interesting application development.

Thanks for all the good work :) - and keep it up, please!

Re: Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone)
 

I can understand your worries about saving stuff on some ones sever without having any control over it. I'm also trying to keep my data on devices where I have the control.

I'm very open to different sync mechanisms and I hope that at some point there will also be proper local sync or maybe sync via ssh, webdav, imap, etc... the only problem is that someone needs to implement it.

For the moment my focus is on syncing against Snowy, because I think that it will be the prefered solution for most users. Once that's stable I might implement other kinds of syncing. Or of course someone comes along and want to help with the implementation. That would definitely speed things up :)

As I said, I'm also not so happy about the cloud idea, but the good thing about Snowy is that it's completely free software. It's written in python and you could even install it on your desktop PC or notebook. Then your data would stay under your control.
More information about Snowy you can find here: http://live.gnome.org/Snowy and the source code is in gnome git.

I'm glad you like it and I welcome your input :) If you are interested in contributing or you know someone who might be, we could try on working together to implement a good local synchronization. Otherwise it will probably take some more time, but please feel free to add an enhancement request to bugzilla and outline how exactly you'd like to have it working. That will help me not to forget about it. Sorry for the slow answer, but I had to get some sleep after the Summit first :)

Re: Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone)
 

Version 0.5.6 in in extras-testing now. The main change is, that the automatic rotation is working again.

Sorry that it took me so long, I was struggling with some repository problems.

Please test it and rate it here:
http://maemo.org/packages/package_in...l/conboy/0.5.6

Hopefully it will go to extras very soon :)

Re: Conboy - Note Taking Application (Tomboy clone)
 

Version 0.6.0-alpha11 is now in extras-devel. It's now called conboy-unstable to make clear what it is.

If you're having a N900 you should really give it a try as it has much improved Maemo 5 support and new features which make it even more fun to use :)

The file format between the stable and the unstable version is the same, so switching back to stable is always possible.

The main visible changes between stable and unstable are:

• Cleaner UI on N900
• Improved portrait mode
• Synchronization support
• Automatic linking of many URIs

Feedback and suggestions are (as always) very welcome!