Hodgepodge of Miscellany, part 1 of 2: FSM, OO.o, Tomboy

I’ve been busy with this and that and wishing I had something more substantial prepared to post. I’ve been doing free software stuff, although nothing lately has generated a longer article. Here’s some scrips and scraps on what I’ve been up to:

(Wait! One of the tidbits grew in to its own post! Stay tuned…)

Free Software Magazine, Issue 20

My first article for Free Software Magazine has been published, in Issue 20: Extending Nautilus (the GNOME file manager): rotating JPG images. I’m actually going to be paid for this one, in cash and a book, so it must be good. See, free can pay. :-)

Thanks, FSM!

OpenOffice.org

Working on miscellaneous details in the overall “moving to freedom” process. I spent some time figuring out how to do envelopes and labels in OpenOffice.org Writer. You would hope it wouldn’t be that difficult, but once upon a time when I couldn’t see an envelope option and went looking for information, I found web pages that described fiendishly complicated procedures. I filed it away to worry about later.

Well, here it is, later, and my printer is only available to my Ubuntu machine. After hand-writing a couple of envelopes, I said fsck this and tried again with Writer. And there it was plain as day, just like in MS Word, the menu Tools » Envelope…. It took a little bit of playing around to get the alignment right, and in the end I figured out that it was easier to take the template and define the page as the size of the envelope, which works fine with the single sheet feeder in my HP LaserJet.

Label printing also works well from File » New » Labels, although have you ever tried printing return address labels on a 20 x 4 sheet? Picky, picky.

Tomboy

Way back when, I used the Palm Desktop application for notes, and I liked how it handled the job. Simple and straight-forward. I continued using it long after I stopped using the Palm PDA. Later versions of the program started dropping the ball on usability, and I decided to take matters in to my own hands and write my own PIM, which I called Notable. I copied the features I liked best from the Palm application and added enhancements of my own. It worked well, but I had unwisely written it in Visual Basic so now I need to either rewrite it in Java, or find a new notes program. (I’ve been running it in Wine, but it’s kind of iffy there, with crashes, slow performance, and some parts not working quite right.)

As much fun as I had writing Notable, I’d rather find an existing project to use. Tomboy is a GNOME note-taking application, and comes included with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). This is appealing to me since it’s readily available and will likely be well-supported. But I’m also cautious, since I don’t want to migrate all my notes again anytime soon if it doesn’t work out.

How might it not work out? Well, the program itself is fantastic. I really like the approach to note-taking here. I’ve already created about 90 notes, and it’s a pleasure to use. The problem for me is that it is a Mono application. I think it’s a mistake to try implementing .NET in GNU/Linux, for reasons I won’t expand on at the moment other than to say I don’t see the need to copy .NET when we have so many other options already available, and I think it’s foolish to risk entanglements with Microsoft’s patents and licenses. The developers are doing a great job with this application, and I’d hate to see them and their users (including myself) get burned down the road.

But still, here I am, using Tomboy. Anyone have any other suggestions? I should probably look around. Some of the features I like in Tomboy: Easy to create new notes, good searching, intra-note links, and the program is accessible from a GNOME panel icon and recent notes are at hand there. Not really looking for web note applications. Google Notes seemed nice at first, but is too clumsy for my taste. (In addition to not being free software.)

Next post: Hodgepodge of Miscellany, part 2 of 2: Google Code, Subversion, Meld