Tomboy Developers Meeting - 08 March 2007, 13:00 PST, #tomboy

• The original plan for the meeting: Tomboy/DevMeeting08Mar2007/Plan

• The IRC log of the meeting: Tomboy/DevMeeting08Mar2007/Log

The idea of the meeting was to work out a clear direction for the future of Tomboy.

1. General Direction

• The biggest strength of Tomboy is that it's just plain simple to use and always works. You should be able to create a new note and start typing as quickly as possible
• Tomboy is a personal note taking application
• We should encourage people to build new frontends to Tomboy to try out advanced stuff

2. 0.6.x

• 0.6.x rocks
• The new more traditional search window with menus etc was a good idea

3. Syncing Notes

• Syncing is a very important/requested feature, up there with bulleted lists
• Sharing notes is out of the scope of this feature
• Should have two modes of syncing:
  • Enter storage URL, and use webdav/ftp to do really simple async background syncing
  • Using Avahi to do automatic sync between nearby computers
• These two can share a lot of code by making Tomboy run a very very simple webdav server and then just using Avahi to advertise the address.
• Some reference code exists:

  • http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/NoteSharing

  • http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/tomboy/branches/tomboy-sharing/

• Merge conflicts can be dealt with by keeping the local note, create a new note containing the foreign content and then just appending a link to the top of the local note linking to the foreign note

4. Scalability

Anything which makes Tomboy slow with large numbers of notes or large notes are bugs, the cause of which should be found and fixed.

5. Tagging

• We could have a single label per note with an assigned colour. This label could be selected with a drop down.
• Multiple tags
  • "Heavy-weight" with a tag entry with autocompletion etc at the bottom of each note. Tag sidebar in search window.
  • Special "Tags: " line inside the note buffer.
• It was agreed that some sort of tagging is useful but making it useful to the largest amount of people is the hardest part.
• We will have future discussions/emails about these or other proposals

6. gtk 2.10

• gtk 2.10 makes implementing certain features easier:
  • Copy and paste
  • Printing

  • Handling most of ForcedPresentWindow in managed code

• The problem we have is that supported operating systems are always far behind the latest and greatest. Lots of distros still ship gtk 2.8
• The 0.6.x branch will continue to support Gtk+-2.8.x but no guarantees for 0.8.x

7. Misc

• Chris will try to implement numbered lists
• Sandy is trying to refactor Tomboy so that building for win32 can be a compile time switch
• We should go through uncommitted patches in bugzilla and commit any that are in good shape

8. Summer of Code

• Last year wasn't very successful
• Smaller more clearly defined goals should work better
• If we do anything with SoC we should suggest ideas that we aren't planning to do ourselves anytime soon and not something we'd want to rely upon in the short-term
• Boyd and Alex do not have time to mentor
• Sandy is willing to mentor with Boyd's support

9. Website and Wiki

• The new website is awesome
• The wiki could use some polish
• People working on features should be listed more as a "go-to guy" to not discourage others from helping or picking up the work.
• Bugs should be opened for road-map goals