Tomdroid's second release!
9 days ago
It is with a little hangover (yesterday I celebrated Quebec’s national holiday) that I announced Tomdroid’s second release on the mailing list not so long ago.
This version brings performance, responsiveness improvements and better overall user experience.
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).
I’ll repeat some of the stuff I mentioned in the announce email but you can skip that if you want.
Version 0.2.0 – this is all wrong
Development is done using SDK 1.5 but the application is compatible with 1.x
- Performance improvements (on my ADP1 ~50 notes loads twice as fast)
- Responsiveness improvements: you can now see the screen updating the note list when it’s parsing notes and interact with it
- Usability/UI improvements (#364851, Benoît Garret)
- Text no longer changes color when scrolling (#364425)
- Fixed concurrency crashes (#389437)
- Messages are now clearer when there are no notes in the tomdroid/ folder vs when the folder doesn’t exist
- Improved usability of the URL input dialog to load a Web note
- Better error reporting to user when loading a note from the Web
- Better Android lifecycle management
- Developer related fixes (#364770, Michael Fletcher)
For now Tomdroid is not available on the Google Market Place but you can find the latest package here. Point your Android browser over there and click on the top .apk file. Alternate installation instructions are available in the README file.
If you encounter any problems or have additional information on issues mentioned above, please open a bug report.
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 offer your help there.
The focus of the next version will be the usage of an sqlite (database) back-end instead of parsing all the note files on each startup. This should result in a dramatic
improvement of the loading time. In the near future, we should see an attempt at editing notes with minimal formatting opportunities and some work to use the snowy REST API for notes in the cloud.
Happy hacking!
— Olivier Bilodeau
Tomdroid's first release!
81 days ago
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
Comment [9]
Special treat on a special day
235 days ago
Those who know me well know at least two things about me:
- Today is a special day for me.. yup it’s my birthday
- I like rum very much
So what is better to finish off the day than to pour few ounces of the best rum I have in my bar as a special treat? Say what? Yeah that’s what I thought: nothing beats that.
The medicine is 11 years old premium rum at room temperature, no ice, nothing. Marvellous! Sorry if the picture is bad, its used without permission from a random website (I would remove it if requested) but I didn’t want to waste what was left of the day taking a picture. I hope you understand ;)
Cheers!
— Olivier Bilodeau
Comment [1]
Getting Prism firefox 3 extension working on Ubuntu
238 days ago
I like prism. The idea of having a separate minimalist browser window for some web applications and have it more crash resistant is very neat. I’ve been using it for gmail since almost a year and I like it!
When I upgraded my ubuntu, I was now using firefox 3 and I have read somewhere that prism was now an extension (prism refractor) and not a standalone application anymore (actually it’s both). Anyways, I wanted to switch to the shiny new extension using firefox 3 instead of my old prism install.
Well, the extension is broken on Ubuntu.. When you try to convert a website to an Application you get a desktop icon that opens a new window of firefox on your homepage. Not very useful.
I’ve searched around a bit and found a workaround. Here you go:
Workaround to get Prism firefox addon work on Ubuntu
- Generate the desktop icon of the web application of your choice (Tools -> Convert Website to Application)
- Modify the properties of the desktop launcher. In the command, change “/usr/bin/firefox-3.0.3/firefox” to /usr/bin/xulrunner
That’s it!
For references you can check this launchpad bug, this mozilla bug and where I got the feeling that this workaround is fine.
[Updated on 2009-04-05]
— Olivier Bilodeau
Comment [3]
Upgrade to Ubuntu Hardy
241 days ago
Just a quick post to praise the Ubuntu lord.
I just upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy Heron moments ago from a beloved Gutsy Gibbon installation that I didn’t want to screw up. I know, I know I’m late..
The thing is, each time I upgraded I got some problems and had to hack around to fix them. It was taking some time that I didn’t want to spend.
Well this time around the upgrade was flawless. No wireless problems, no X problems (I avoided that by getting a laptop using open source graphics drivers with the intel card) and none of the other weird problems I experienced in the past upgrades.
The only thing left to test is sleep mode.
Bravo Ubuntu!
— Olivier Bilodeau