Happy New Year

It's a new year (still unbelievable to me), so it's a perfect time to blow the dust off my blog and start anew. I'm still alive and kicking! It's now been over four months since I started the whole self-employment thing. It's going pretty well.

For the last few weeks, I've been wearing all sorts of hats trying to get ready for Macworld Expo '09. Preparing for a tradeshow (more than just at a computer programmer level) has been very eye-opening. I've been ordering endless booth items, designing posters, getting stickers printed, writing code for a new release of Todo, preparing Appigo Sync for beta, etc. I've never worked so hard in my life! It should be a fun show. Drop by if you happen to be there (Booth 4025).

I saw something cool while passing through the local Walmart store today. I guess Walmart is selling iPhones now? News to me...I must be living in a cave. Hey, what's that app they have pictured in the far right side of that display booth? Oh hey, that's AccuFuel!

Tasque at Novell BrainShare '08

For anyone who missed seeing Tasque in person at Novell BrainShare '08, you can now see the video demo where Calvin and I showed it off. Click here to see it on Google Video or here for the Real Video.

For a complete listing of videos from BrainShare, go to the General Sessions page and click on the videos tab. Tasque was part of the OPS (Friday) keynote session.

Modified: 3-31-08, added real video link.

Tasky is now Tasque

Many of you probably know, but just in case you didn't, "Tasky" has been renamed to "Tasque." We're still waiting for a proper Bugzilla and mailing list hosted by GNOME. Until then, you can get more information about the project at http://live.gnome.org/Tasque and join us in #tasque on GimpNet.

Yesterday, Calvin and I showed Tasque to the Brainshare '08 crowd at Friday's General Session. Tasque performed flawlessly. Calvin wrote up an excellent summary of how it went.

Earlier this week, we created a "cache" branch in SVN where we've started work to have the UI work directly against data stored locally in an SQLite DB. This will allow tasks to be accessed and modified without a network connection. The interface that backends (like RTM, Evolution, or Novell T+C) will implement should be much easier since they'll no longer have to manage a TreeModel.

Tomboy 0.9.8 Released

Just wanted to post a quick blurb about Tomboy 0.9.8...it's available and we're now in Hard Code Freeze. It seems to be pretty stable, which should line up nicely for next week. Only documentation and translation updates are allowed now in SVN Trunk until next Monday (March 10, 2008).

If you have time to help out with updating the screenshots and/or writing some documentation about the new Notebooks feature, please contact me. We've got to get something done ASAP!

Complete release notes can be found in the announcement I made in the mailing list.

Here you go openSUSE 10.3'ers:

Bugslashed Tomboy 0.9.7 released

I just rolled a new Tomboy 0.9.7 tarball which includes a LOT of bugfixes.

Kudos to everyone who participated in our Bugslashing Day (which kind of extended over the weekend). We reviewed/closed 40+ bugs and committed 20+ fixes!

Thanks, btw, for the good laughs along the way. This summed it up pretty well, I thought:

"I've never written a kernel before, but I'm working on replacing Linux. I'm using Visual Basic, and so far I've got a window on the screen. Can anyone help me out?" -Ian

For openSUSE 10.3-ers (a 1click install):

Tomboy Bugslashing Tomorrow (Friday)

If you hadn't noticed already, the list of Tomboy bugs have been piling up like mad! Unfortunately, we haven't had a lot of time lately to keep on top of them. With the GNOME 2.22 deadlines (hard code freeze on March 3rd), we need to get our act together.

TOMORROW (Friday, 22 Feb 2008) we're gonna attempt to knock away as many as we can. If you have a spare moment to help out with the effort, please join us in #tomboy on gimpnet tomorrow. Submit as many fixes, test out patches, comment on bugs, whatever you can do to help!

Tasky cracks the whip!

Novell's HackWeek #2 (Feb. 11 - 15, 2008) provided me with many late and sleep-deprived nights. The end result? Tasky!

Tasky is a simple task management application for the Linux Desktop, written in what's becoming my favorite language C#. By default, Tasky hooks up with your Remember the Milk account and allows you to quickly add/edit/complete your tasks right from your desktop in a much more intuitive way than the browser.

Tarballs, source code, screenshots, and additional information about Tasky can be found here:

http://tasky.googlecode.com/

Another little goodie some of you might like, is a proof-of-concept Tomboy Add-in for Tasky. You'll find it in the root directory of Tasky's source code. It will apply to Tomboy's latest SVN (trunk). To apply the patch, `cd` into Tomboy's root project directory and type:

patch -p0 < tomboy-tasky-addin.patch

Recompile Tomboy, `make install` and you should be good to go. You may have to kill a running tomboy process if you're running as a panel applet. Additionally, you may need to `rm -rf ~/.tomboy/addin*` to clear out any old Mono.Addin stuff so Tomboy will pick up the new add-in.

Last but not least, a 1-click install for those of you running openSUSE 10.3: