Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Monday 27 July 2009

Why I did write Gnote?

Because there are so many misconception about why I wrote Gnote, I think I should clarify a bit as my original announcement wasn't clear. This is to follow up on a question that was asked to me this morning where said person, who will likely read that and probably recognise thyself, had said misconception.

I wrote Gnote to answer two questions:

  • How can I have Tomboy functionality on my custom openSUSE image I made for my EEE PC, that will fit the 2GB? I don't have room for Mono on this. For what is worth, back when I tried to put a distro on it, the only distro that would fit out of the box on this EEE PC was Eeedora, a Fedora based image for the EEE PC, but that only did provide XFCE. Since I wanted GNOME, it ended up not being that useful as I didn't have a the Fedora tools to actually regenerated a custom one. None of the other did fit on 2GB, including the Mandriva Flash I had from GUADEC, Ubuntu's own, etc.
  • Is it easy to port a C# application to C++?

The second question helped me to answer the first question.

I decided that since I'm advocating Free Software, there was no reason to develop behind closed doors. I just kept it silent for the first weeks of coding, as I actually wanted to have something that works, but it was, since day 2, on gitorious. For the rest, you all know what happened: the anti-Mono crowd took it as their victory, started FUDing, etc. Barely nobody asked me why I had written that code, compared to the many that actually thought I was supporting their cause. But that's how the internet work.

The worse part is that I seem to be have been the target of hateful messages and comments from a certain number of people who found that writing code is hostile, while they blessed Tomdroid and Conboy which both take a different approach to a similar problem (kudos to their respective authors, I find Conboy fitting well on my N800, even though any typing is like torture).

And if you still think I hate Mono think again. I worked for the company that pushes Mono (and still wish I was), and I was using Tomboy on all the Linux machines I had (and to be fair I was surprised of the number of people who actually told me they had never used it because it was Mono based... looks like this didn't stop me as I had been using it for as long as I have the laptop I'm typing this on, circa Dec 2005).

Will I continue Gnote development?

Even though I'd love to have help, I definitely will maintain it as long as I can. The next release will have a boatload of features and fixes, including D-Bus support, etc. It is all in git. One has to admit the pace as slowed down recently because I have been working on other things, including AbiWord and Niepce.

Will I port another application?

No. But if a somebody is willing to hire me for that, please, feel free to contact me, I'll see what I can do.

Wednesday 17 June 2009

Gnote 0.5.0

I just uploaded Gnote 0.5.0.

Get it from GNOME FTP

Read up the announcement on the new mailing list for a detailled changelog.

Beside the bug fixes, the new feature is auto import of Tomboy (and eventually Sticky Notes) notes at first run. Also I reduced a bit the dependencies: no more libxml++, no more boost.regex, but pcre instead.

Wednesday 27 May 2009

Gnote 0.4.0

Just released Gnote 0.4.0.

Dependency changes: now libxml++ 2.26 is REQUIRED, because of nasty bugs in older release. Upstream itself said it was unusable. Also, if you are a packager, be aware that libxml++ 2.26 break the ABI silently. You must understand that before doing any upgrade. See bug 583825.

I already have a branch that just remove this dependency, I'll merge it after this release.

Download it

New features:

  • Handle command line argument --version and --search
  • Backlinks addin.
  • Addin to export to HTML.

Fixes:

  • Hard require on libxml++ 2.26. Should prevent some bugs (Bug #583807, Bug #583808, Bug #579292, Bug #579316) See git
  • Note is now trackable. Should avoid a crash related to signals. (Closes #581618)
  • Remove obsolete UTF-8 keyword in .desktop (Closes #581623) (Robert Millan)
  • Fix build with LDFLAGS="-Wl,--as-needed" (Closes #581559) (Priit Laes)
  • '-' in note title was mistakenly doubled in the menu. (Closes #581643)
  • Fix crash when entering an URL instead of a host name for the bugzilla icon in the bugzilla addin (Closes #581080)
  • Stop calculating the status icon menu position by thyself.
  • Fix UI for InsertTimeStamp addin (Closes #582788) (0.1.1)
  • Fix inconsistency in search dialog selection causing drag and drop and delete to mis-behave. (Closes #579107, Closes #582757)
  • gnote-applet is in libexec. (Closes #581631)
  • Fix markup error in German localization (Closes #582975)
  • Fix error on first run in German (de_DE) (Debian bug #528930)

Translations:

  • Added translations: - Bengali India (bn_IN) - Hungarian (hu)
  • Updated translations: - Arabic (ar) - German (de) - Japanese (ja) - Spanish (es)
  • Added Greek manual.
  • Added Spanish manual.

Tuesday 5 May 2009

Gnote 0.3.1 - "Five-One-Four"

Since tomorrow I'll be in Montreal for LGM, today will be release day for Gnote 0.3.1 "Five-One-Four". Next week should be back to the regular schedule. This is a bugfix release, and it is available on GNOME FTP as usual.

The changes are:

Fixes:

  • Missing header in src/addins/inserttimestamp/inserttimestampnoteaddin.cpp
  • Don't crash when deleting a note (Closes #579839)
  • Plugged various memory leaks.
  • Cleared up a few Gtkmm warnings.
  • Applet was trying to use an icon named "tomboy" (Closes #581226) (Robert Millan)
  • .desktop file didn't have the version (Jonathon Jongsma)
  • .desktop has improper XFCE category and should have OnlyShowIn entry for GNOME and XFCE (Closes #580481)
  • Help didn't work in the Note windows. (Closes #581200)
  • Notebook addin toolbar button was inconsistent. (Closes #581213)
  • Delete notebook now works in the search dialog. (Closes #581222)
  • Popup menus in the search dialog now appear.
  • Output options at the end of configure and fail if D-Bus is enabled.

Translations:

  • Added translations: - Japanese (ja)
  • Updated translations: - Arabic (ar) - Catalan (ca) - French (fr) - Spanish (es)
  • Fix format causing crashes. (Closes #580868)
  • Fix a typo in the gconf schema description (Closes #581239)
  • Fix small translatable strings (Closes #579197)

Wednesday 29 April 2009

Gnote 0.3.0

Wednesday is release day for Gnote. Version 0.3.0 is now available on GNOME FTP.

Here is the changelog:

New features:

  • Applet support (Closes #578979).
  • Print addon.
  • Insert Time Stamp addon.
  • Bugzilla addon.
  • Implement addin preferences.

Fixes:

  • Should now build if Gtk+ 2.16 is present but not Gtkmm 2.16.
  • Should build with Gtk+ 2.12 and Gtkmm 2.12 (Closes #580250) (Robert Millan)
  • Fix a typo in gnote.1 (Closes #580211) (Robert Millan)
  • Desktop file reflect XFCE and bugzilla component. (Closes #580481) (Ritesh Khadgaray)
  • Missing accelerators in link context menu (Closes #580443) (Mário Machado)
  • Reference bugzilla component in server file (Closes #579198)

Translations:

  • Short descriptions in shema must not end with a '.' (Closes #579337)
  • Added translations: - British English (en_GB) - Czech (cs) - Portugese (pt) - Spanish (es) - Thai (th)
  • Updated translations: - Arabic (ar) - German (de)

Wednesday 22 April 2009

Gnote 0.2.0

I just released Gnote 0.2.0. Here is the changelog:

New features

  • Now support addins (Bug #578980): - Fixed Width
  • Show addins in preferences.

Fixes:

  • Can now close the template note opened when the Preferences dialog is open. (Close #579105)
  • Check for Gtk+ 2.14 or later and include gtk/gtk.h in src/utils.cpp (Close #579240)
  • Fix wrongly highlighted URLs and a crash when inserting in some situation. (Close #579225)
  • Fix offsets on WikiWord (similar to bug #579225)
  • Initialize gettext properly (Close #579520)
  • Properly check for libxml2.
  • Drag and drop of notes to a notebook (Close #579637)
  • Fixed hang when changing the title of a note (Close #579362)
  • The open state of notes is now saved properly.

Translations:

  • Update comment to reflect format in strings. (Close #579209)
  • Ensure the spelling of Gnote.
  • Some strings shouldn't be translated. (Close #579197)
  • Date format are non localizable. (Close #579207)
  • Properly use plural forms (Close #579412)
  • Remove markup from translatable strings (Close #579453)
  • Added translations: - Swedish (sv) - Greek (el) - Arabic (ar) - Catalan (ca) - German (de) - French (fr)

Many thanks to the translation teams and the people who provided feedback.

The tarball can be downloaded fronm GNOME FTP

There is more to come: the addins (I had to rewrite an addin system based on Glib::Module, which I hope will be generic enough ; I'll see when I integrate it into Niepce), the synchronization (I have a branch locally that I need to test thoroughly, for which I also needed addin support), and what not.

Wednesday 15 April 2009

Gnote 0.1.2

I just released Gnote 0.1.2. Here are the changes:

  • Don't return containers on the stack.
  • BUG: Pinning notes now work.
  • BUG: Fix a potential crasher in PrefsKeybinder in the gconf callback.
  • BUG: Fixed typos in man page.
  • BUG: Remove the use of gettext calls that are only in glib 2.18
  • BUG: Fix Note search that didn't work. (Close #578956) (Wade Berrier)
  • BUG: Fix the position of the menu in case of popping upward. (Close #578958)
  • NEW: Imported the manual (Close #578982)
  • NEW: Addin preferences. (TO FINISH)
  • Clarified some (c) notices.

You can find it on GNOME FTP

Moving to GNOME

Gnote is now in GNOME git repository.

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnote/

All you need is to pull from there.

It also has a bug tracker in GNOME bugzilla.

Update: is seems to be misunderstood that the URL above is for the web git interface. The git URL is git://git.gnome.org/gnote

Tuesday 7 April 2009

Gnote 0.1.1

The unavoidable bugs arose, mostly build bugs[1]. So if you had an error on BOOST_FOREACH, it is fixed. Bye-bye, gone.

Thanks do Dodji for the testing.

I released Gnote 0.1.1.

Download

Notes

[1] if only I could have a few chroot to build with different versions

Monday 6 April 2009

Gnote 0.1.0

Following my April 1st announcement, I ironed out the last detail I deemed necessary for a 0.1.0 release of Gnote.

It should build on recent systems. I welcome any feedback or patches. If you have a build failure, I at least need the compiler errors.

Source tarballs - Homepage

PS: it is known to not build on Debian etch because of an antique version of boost.