BrainShare 2007

Today at BrainShare, I logged-in to one of the public access computers by scanning my badge. I was pleased to see Tomboy running; and it's customized for BrainShare!

Look for the upcoming Novell Open Audio podcast recorded live today featuring Nat Friedman and myself. I got asked a few questions about Tomboy and open source software and hopefully I answered intelligently. Fortunately Nat answered the one question about OSS in a much more business-like fashion.

Tomboy and MonoDevelop at last!

Thanks to Sandy, Tomboy now has a true MonoDevelop solution!

I'm using the latest MonoDevelop (version 0.13) and am extremely impressed with how well it's working. Now that Tomboy's all hooked-up in there (have to run ./autogen.sh first), I imagine I'll be spending a lot more time using it.

One thing that just blew my socks off is the automatic ChangeLog feature I can see the changes from each file in the individual window, add my comments for each file, and voila, the ChangeLog file is automatically updated when I do a commit. Hands down, this is one of the coolest features I've seen in any IDE for a long time. I was skeptical at first, but I just committed my first code straight from MonoDevelop and never had to even open the ChangeLog file. Way to go guys!

As awesome as this configuration is, I'm still hung up over a few things. I've been a long-time user of Eclipse (yes, even with C#) just purely because I've become addicted to some of its features. Perhaps one day MonoDevelop will have these as well?

• Split up the screen with different source editors by dragging the source window's tab control to the edge of a the window. There's no limit to the number of separate windows I can split up.
• Highlight a block of code and press Alt+UpArrow or Alt+DownArrow to move the block of code up or down in the source. This is a really convenient way of swapping the order of source lines. If no blocks are highlighted, it moves the current line.
• Configurable keybindings
• I use Ctrl+K (find next selection) and Ctrl+Shift+K (find previous selection) constantly. In MonoDevelop, find next selection is Ctrl+F3, but find previous selection doesn't seem to exist...and I *guess* I can relearn this new keybinding. For those of you coming from Win32, I'm sure no adjustment is needed.
• I can double-click a source file window tab and it will be maximized in the entire Eclipse application window. This is really handy for when I want to just focus on a single file and need as much real-estate as possible. When I'm finished and want to go back to the normal view, I just double-click the source file's window title/tab again and I'm back where I started.
• After I save changes to a file, their icon in the left-hand pane appears differently (letting me know it's been modified). Someone mentioned MD does this, but I haven't seen it yet, so maybe it's just a bug.

In any case, despite the missing features, MD seems to have a LOT of sweet little things (like pretty rockin ' code completion). It's definitely got my attention.

Creativity and Innovation

I discovered a cool site with some interesting podcasts from Stanford University. One in particular that I listened to was one by Marissa Mayer from Google where she points out nine lessons learned in being creative.

Some of the points I found interesting:

• Work with smart people
• Just like playing sports, you play better when you play with those who are better than you
• Don't be territorial about your ideas
• Look for new ideas everywhere
• Launch early and iterate instead of trying to make things perfect right away
• Rely on the data
• e.g., "How many people had problems with the UI?", "How many people did you test?"
• This makes political battles mostly disappear within the company

Road map set for Tomboy 0.8.0

With the bulk of the 0.6.x work behind us (just letting translations trickle in at this point) for GNOME 2.18, we had a meeting to scope out what to do next.

So, what's next? Check out the entire Road Map for the details, but the main two things are:

1. Note synchronization (EVERYONE wants this!)
2. Tagging

All the hairy details of both of these have yet to be determined, but at least we know where we're headed.