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  • in GNOME
  • 3 min read

Thank you Stormy

sdc10350.jpg

Most people by now have heard that news that Stormy is leaving as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation to take a position at Mozilla.

I’ve had a few people reach out to me to follow up on her announcement to make sure it has nothing to do with the drama going on in the community (it doesn’t) or concerned about the timing with GNOME 3.0 coming (GNOME 3.0 is still coming!)

Now, no one on the Board asked me to do this and I’m speaking for myself, but I believe we’ll be ok. We have a great release coming in April and the Release Team is doing a great job of overseeing that. GNOME Developers are porting apps fast and furious to GTK3, GNOME Shell is coming along nicely, release parties are being planned, docs are being written and I could keep going on. None of these activities are going to stop because we don’t have an ED.

Most of us have left a job at some point – it’s not personal. And Stormy gets to work on something she’s passionate about. I saw this first hand this past April at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit where she organized a track to talk about how the desktop should interact with web services. Cornelius from KDE spoke, I spoke, Rejon from identi.ca and more. She also received some great press from a talk she gave this past August about software freedom on the web. And now she has a chance to work to further that cause – which is a worthy one. While I’m sad to see her go, I’m happy to know she continues to work on software freedom and something she is just as passionate about, if not more so.

Stormy has always been visible to the GNOME community and transparent about the work she does with her regular updates of what she’s working on via her blog and emails to the Foundation list. But one of the most important things she did within the community was never in those recaps – and that’s the encouragement she provided to everyone who pinged her. As the face of the Foundation, volunteers would ping her to get her opinion on a new idea or a new feature. They valued her opinion, but more importantly, they wanted affirmation they were doing something right.

Stormy did that for me – in my last job I would commute to Boulder, Colorado about once a quarter, which isn’t too far from where Stormy lived. I was active in the community, but with Stormy’s gentle nudges, I was inspired to take that to the next level. Stormy made time for me and we would meet for coffee or lunch every couple of months and brainstorm and get stuff done. Stormy encouraged me to come to GUADEC in 2009 and was always there to listen to a new idea or answer a question.

I am grateful we had someone as qualified as Stormy to work for the Foundation the last 2+ years. Sure, I’m sad to see her go – not that she’s going far – but more importantly, I’m thankful for everything she has done for everyone in the GNOME community. Thanks again Stormy!

  • in GNOME
  • 2 min read

Taking Snowy for a Walk #4 – Meet the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel

Photo: “Untitled” by Rach

We are just two weeks away from the Boston Summit which is also the site of the upcoming Snowy Hackfest. We’re cooking up all kinds of plans for the hackfest. Our goals include:

  • An HTML5 mobile client
  • Integrating note editing into Snowy so you can edit your notes in a web browser
  • Focus on the user interface

In other news, Snowy 0.5, “Cavalier King Charles Spaniel”, was released on Monday to coincide with the GNOME 2.91.1 release and Tomboy Online was updated to Snowy 0.5. There is a method to the madness in Sandy’s choice of release names – I have a GNOME sticker (or stickers) as a prize to the first person who can tell me. (Contest not open to Snowy developers. Must be a resident of Planet Earth. Other rules and restrictions may apply but probably not. I’ll pay postage.) Version 0.5 was a minor bugfix release – expect lots of big changes after the hackfest. (Note I just say after – can’t hold me to a date!)

We received some new UI mockups – check them out on the wiki! Here’s one:

Tomboy Online mockup

The second wave of alpha invites went out on Monday. If you’re on the list, you just got a bit closer to getting our invite! Thanks to our alpha testers, we’re getting some great feedback via email and Bugzilla. Keep it coming!

Lastly, I was added as an administrator to help with new account activation. Commence evil genius laugh.

About Snowy: _Snowy is a web-based viewer for your Tomboy notes. It’s written in Python using the Django web framework, and is licensed under the AGPL.

Tomboy Online is a deployment of the Snowy software on GNOME servers, intended to provide free note sync and online note access to all Tomboy users.

Please check out our website here: http://live.gnome.org/Snowy

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

Help Bryen out

I can’t think of many worse ways to start a week than to read Bryen’s blog post this morning about having his equipment stolen as he travels to the Accessibility conference and hackfest. I was impressed to see how many of my friends shared the post in Google Reader to pass the news on.

I pinged Stormy to see if there was something we can do and and she let me know my co-worker Stephen Shaw was already on it. Stephen has set up a Pledgie to collect donations to help Bryen out. I’m pretty excited as I went out to lunch and after coming back I see we’re already halfway past the goal!

I first met Bryen almost a year ago at the first GNOME Marketing Hackfest in Chicago. It was great meeting him in person and understanding how he used GNOME gave me a better understanding for how important GNOME’s support for accessibility is. Since then, I’ve worked and talked with Bryen about GNOME marketing and openSUSE marketing and have really enjoyed working with him.

If you have a few dollars you can spare, please think about donating. Thanks!

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

GNOME 2.32 Screenshots needed

The GNOME 2.32 release notes need your help!

If you have a GNOME 2.31.x development environment, I’m looking for 2 or 3 screenshots:

  • GNOME desktop with either Nautilus (and some files and folders cut and ready to be pasted) OR 2.32 desktop with Empathy showing meta-contacts
  • Empathy with meta-contacts
  • Nautilus with some files or folders cut and ready to be pasted

When using the GNOME screenshot tool, you can select the entire desktop or the application with focus. No effects should be applie and you may need to turn Compiz off with some distros (otherwise the window borders aren’t visible).

A couple guidelines:

  • Screenshots must use the Clearlooks theme, a GNOME background / wallper and the default GNOME icons
  • The icon in the GNOME menu on the panel must show the GNOME foot, not a distribution logo
  • Your GNOME panel should be as clean as possible (If using Ubuntu, do not show the messaging menu in the panel)
  • If using openSUSE, your panel needs to be on the top
  • Your screenshots will be licensed under a CC-BY 3.0 license

Sorry for all the rules! You will receive attribution in the release notes. Email them to me at pcutler at gnome dot org. Thanks!

Taking Snowy for a Walk – Issue 3: What users want

We launched the sign-ups for the upcoming Tomboy Online alpha last week. As part of the sign-up process we included a brief survey asking what features those signing up were interested in and to rate them on a scale of 1 – 5, which 5 being very interested.

We asked them to rate the following features:

  • Free note synchronization for Tomboy
  • Sharing my notes so other users can read them
  • Editing my notes from my desktop web browser
  • Native Android app (Tomdroid)
  • Native iOS app
  • HTML5 offline client (for all mobile desktop browsers)
  • Editing my notes from my mobile device (browser, native app, whatever)

Here are the results:

Tomboy Online Features

(If it’s hard to read, here is link to the png file too, squint really hard)

It’s a fairly small sample, but I’m still please to see so little interest in iOS and a huge interest in Android and HTML5.

Snowy was approved for a hackfest at the Boston Summit. The hackfest goals include match up nicely with the survey results. The goals include:

  • Mobile client for accessing and syncing notes
  • Implement UI / Design via CSS
  • Implement a text editor
  • Implement note sharing between users via the web interface
  • Prepare Tomboy Online for Beta release

And if there are any companies that want to help sponsor the hackfest, please let me or Stormy know!

We’re excited to be working on a web service that integrates with the GNOME Desktop. We have one bug to fix that’s delayed the alpha launch slightly. Thanks to everyone who has signed up and we’ll get the invites out ASAP.

  • in GNOME
  • 2 min read

Taking Snowy for a Walk – Issue 2: Alpha dog

Annabella and Bam at play

(Licensed under a CC-BY 2.0 licensed by tanakawho)

Things have been relatively quiet since my last update about Snowy a couple of weeks ago. What’s been going on behind the scenes:

  • Sandy triaged and assigned milestones to lots of features requests in Snowy bugzilla.
  • Jeff hacked on Snowy to allow users to add a second OpenID provider to an existing account. Unfortunately it will have to be refactored as it works great for new users signing up but not for existing users as the form enforces that the users are unique. (Here’s a great area to help out with if you know Django and / or OpenID!)
  • We started working on a privacy policy.
  • Jeff implemented breadcrumbs for notebooks and the UI needs to be finished for this.
  • Jeff and Sandy did some troubleshooting about how debug works in Snowy.
  • The FAQ was updated about the alpha that starts today.

Just in case you were skimming, I’ll say that last part again:

The FAQ was updated about the alpha that starts today.

How do you get in the alpha? Well, the alpha is still invite only, but first you should read the FAQ and then you should fill out the form to let us know you’re interested. The form helps us by first, keeping a list of everyone who is interested, and secondly, understanding what features are important to our users. But please understand that by signing up for the alpha and the beta we are asking for your help – if and when you encounter a bug, let us know!

Did you know? Snowy is Tintin‘s pet dog.

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

Privacy Policies

Dear Lazyweb,

I’m working on the privacy policy for Tomboy Online and I’m looking for examples of good privacy polices.

Users will have the ability keep their notes private or share them with other users and as the GNOME Snowy server will be hosting all of the data we will want to have a privacy policy in place.

If you know of a website or web service with a good privacy please comment or drop me an email. Thanks in advance!

  • in GNOME
  • 2 min read

Keep On Rockin’ Me Baby

_Well, I`ve been looking real hard

And I`m trying to find a job

But it just keeps getting

Tougher every day

But I got to do my part

Cause I know in my heart

I got to please my

Sweet baby, yeah

Steve Miller

I’ve been using Banshee for years now and I don’t know how I’d manage my (too) large music collection without it. The Banshee team released 1.7.5 on Tuesday. Banshee 1.7.5 has two new big features:

Trying to do my part, I’ve been working on all new documentation for Banshee written as topic based help using Mallard. The first release of user help was last month in Banshee 1.7.4 and with 1.7.5 I’d call it functionally complete.

banshee-help

(Click through to see a bigger version)

Now is when the fun starts! My process is to write and write some more, and then come back and edit. I think I have most of the major help topics covered. Or do I? I need your help! Take a look through the docs. Have I missed any topics? Can you find mistakes I’ve made in how Banshee works? (I don’t pretend to be a Banshee expert or even use half of it’s features!) Typos? Grammar errors? (I wish I was a machine and could type perfectly, but sometimes I type like Aaron on a Thinkpad T410).

Lastly, I need to add content for common problems and advanced help, such as adding an is_audio file to some MP3 players to have Banshee recognize the player.

How can you help after doing one of the tasks above? File a bug! Drop me an email! Ping me in IRC in #banshee on GIMPNet! I want your feedback and ways I can make the help better, especially with the advanced topics and common problems that users may see.

And a big thank you to Aaron, Gabriel, Bertrand, Alex and all the developers who keep Banshee rockin’.