Tomdroid's first release!
14 April 2009, 01:01
I had the pleasure to announce Tomdroid’s first release on the Tomboy mailing list.
For those who don’t know, Tomdroid is a Tomboy compatible wikiwiki note-taking application for Android. Right now it’s a tomboy note viewer but soon it should be considered a full tomboy client for android (I hope).
What we have on the plate right now is what should be considered a “baby eating” release, meaning that if I screw up your phone, it’s not my fault. You are warned.
I’ll repeat some of the stuff I mentionned in the announce email but you can skip that if you want.
Version 0.1.0 – the baby eating release
Features:
- Show the list of all notes in the tomdroid/ directory on the sdcard
View individual Tomboy notes. All formatting tags should be supported. Notebooks, tags and addins will not be understood.- You can load a note from a Web URL. In that case, links to other notes won’t work.
Known issues:
- Crash can occur when your device runs low on memory or if the app is left running in the background for long period of time. Use the close button when not using the app. (Android lifecycle elements are not implemented yet)
- Application hangs on startup if there is a large number of notes (>50). There is a problem in the way threading works. It’ll be worked on for the next release.
- Notebook templates are shown as normal notes
- Some notes can’t be opened (believed to be caused by notes with a multi-line title)
The latest Tomdroid can be found at: tomdroid’s launchpad download page
There are installation instructions in the readme.
If you encounter any problems or have additional information on issues mentioned above, please report a bug.
If you have an idea for an enhancement please register a blueprint.
If you want to provide any additional help (translation, code, website, testing, publicity, etc.) feel free to subscribe to the tomdroid-dev mailing list and propose help.
I’ve been working on this software on my spare time for the past few months. It all started as my “capstone” project at University but I graduaded and continued working on it (since University always wants more documents than code anyways). Now it’s in a “presentable” shape for developers I think.
By releasing, I’ve met a milestone that I gave myself: I will now order a Dev Phone 1. I earned it. The unfortunate thing is that I checked last week and the “taxes and duties” fees for Canada are a rip off.. like 170$US. On a 400$ device this is almost half the price.. I’ll have to find a way around that.. After all, I’m not that far from the states. ;)
Anyways, have fun breaking tomdroid, it shouldn’t be that hard. See you soon with more updates.
Happy hacking!
— Olivier Bilodeau
That is awesome. Super, super awesome. Question- what do you find is the best way to keep notes in sync between desktop and phone?
— luis · 14 April 2009, 13:36 · #
Right now there are not that many options. Depending on your shell affinity you might:
- Copy the files by hand (from .tomboy/*.note to /tomdroid/ on the sdcard)
- Use this little script that will use adb to copy every note from .tomboy/ into the device plugged into the PC or the emulator if its running. For the script to work you need android’s SDK installed and the tools/ directory in your PATH. Then depending on your OS you might have to follow step 3 of this link to get your phone detected.
I will definitely look into building either a tomboy addin or a nautilus/dbus/hal thingy that would offer to copy over the files when the phone is detected.
Not having a device in my hands doesn’t really help me building a good copy script right now. Is the sdcard automatically mounted when you plug the phone in?
— Olivier · 14 April 2009, 15:04 · #
Wow, really cool!
— Andreas Nilsson · 14 April 2009, 15:29 · #
It is not automatically mounted; you have to manually mount after plugging it in.
I’m frankly half-tempted to take up a collection to cover the shipping fees :)
May be worth looking at:
http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/NoteSharing/
or http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/NetworkedTomboy
— luis · 14 April 2009, 17:35 · #
The Tomboy project is working on a few exciting approaches to good note synchronization between Tomboy and Tomdroid. Stay tuned!
— Sandy · 19 April 2009, 10:35 · #
This is really cool. I don’t use tomboy because I usually keep my notes on my G1. Any ideas for development? I have some time to contribute.
I pulled the code today. It mostly built. Unfortunately your eclipse compile defaults != my eclipse compiler defaults. It didn’t like your @Override on interface methods.
Perhaps I could contribute an ant script. Or project-scoped compiler options.
— Michael Fletcher · 20 April 2009, 23:11 · #
@Michael: Could this be because you are using Java 1.4 compiler by default? Annotation support came with Java 5. If this is the case, I guess we should enforce Java 5 compiler in the project’s metadata.
If you are interested in development you should join the tomdroid-dev mailing list on launchpad.
Oh I just see that you already joined. Great! I’ll leave the link in this comment anyways in case other people are interested ;)
— Olivier · 21 April 2009, 11:38 · #
This might just mean that I will buy a G1 after all. However, I have about 1800 notes in my .tomboy.
Any chance that tomdroid will be able to handle this amount of notes, or should I look into other ways of arranging my notes into a wiki on a portable system? Creating html pages takes an awful amount of time – time I don’t have. :O
— Neural · 10 May 2009, 08:57 · #
Right now 1800 notes will take forever to load. 0.2.0 should be better but starting from 0.3.0 it should be way better.
If you can test releases (or even better, pre-releases) with your notes it would be awesome!
— Olivier · 2 June 2009, 14:40 · #