Tomdroid 0.3.1 "fundationem"

8 March 2010, 00:17

Tomdroid's logoYes, yes beautiful! The 0.3.0 0.3.1 version of tomdroid is out. A little long in the making, it’s finally over and it’s great! The full announce is available here (and here’s the update for 0.3.1).

As said earlier, this version’s major highlights are snappy startup (thanks to Benoît Garret!), better user interaction and overall polish.

Actually, this release is somewhat a foundation towards more work in several areas thus the cheesy fundationem code name. As you all guessed, fundationem is the latin source for foundation meaning the “action of founding” and it’s what we’ve been doing here so it all makes sense doesn’t it?

the new stuff

“So what is in these new layers of ugly concrete you call a foundation?” you want to ask me? Well, not much as I’ve already told you but:

startup improvements

We no longer parse all notes on startup, we use a database and on a device like android it’s a day and night difference, I mean “multi-second feels kind of hanged” startup vs a “snappy I’m ready for you” one.

application size

We used to use a very big but powerful date library to understand tomboy’s dates inside the notes. This library was not suited for a mobile device, with a size of over 300kb.. Fortunately, an API introduced in 1.5 allows us to do the same work without this big library. It was dropped, at the cost of requiring 1.5 at minimum but according to this report more than 99% of the devices out there are using 1.5+ so I’m not worried.

new bugs!

I’m sure I introduced some nasty new note parsing bugs while trying to fix #364850 and #483101. People with fancy notes, please give this version your weirdest notes and report any bugs in our bug tracker!

the future!

note creation

In the near future, you should see an attempt at editing notes with minimal formatting opportunities. It will probably be a lot of experimentation and we will need user feedback to get things right and cover a lot of different use cases. Tomboy is a software that is so flexible and “out of your way” that I can’t think of all the ways people use it.. And of course, people will expect the same functionality in tomdroid.

sync

Benoît Garret created a branch that can do notes synchronization over the web using the Tomboy Web REST API for notes in the cloud. Currently, Ubuntu One offers a note synchronization service and then there’s a soon-to-be-released service called Tomboy Online hosted by Gnome that will actually run Snowy. For a bit of background, Snowy is the effort that lead to Tomboy’s Web REST API, so you can think of it as the reference implementation. It is available under the AGPL meaning you’ll always be able to run the same software as Tomboy Online on your own server! Isn’t that cool? You want a private note store for your business? You can too!

Anyways, all this to say that sync is a big deal and that in the near future Benoît’s effort will be integrated into Tomdroid.

Now, I’ll repeat the NEWS portion I mentioned in the announce email but you can skip that if you want.

Version 0.3.1 – fundationem (fixed with a tie wrap)

Version 0.3.0 – fundationem
Android 1.5 or later required

Download the latest Tomdroid here

Any problems? Please open up a bug report.

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.

Thanks for your attention and stay tuned for Tomdroid 0.4! (or maybe 0.3.2?)

— Olivier Bilodeau

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Comment

  1. Great work Tomdroid team! :-)

    — Sandy · 10 March 2010, 22:22 · #

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