A few of us VMware peeps visited the Ubunutu Conference down on the Google Campus for a discussion on the future of virtualization yesterday. It was a fruitful talk, and I think we created some new avenues for communication and future involvement.
Christian and I stuck around for a while to hang out with open source friends and Googlers. I was in the mood to hack so I worked on a Tomboy feature I’ve been wanting for a long time:
Pinned Notes
On the right edge of the note menu, which shows recently used and currently opened Tomboy notes, there’s a new pin icon that you can click. Pinned notes stick around until you unpin them. It’s really useful for frequently accessed notes like TODO lists and status reports that you want to keep on the note menu indefinitely.
The idea comes originally from Jensen Harris’ excellent Office UI blog post about the Office 12 recently used list.
Code for pinning is already checked into CVS so please try it out and let me know how it works for you. I’d love to get some prettier pin icons made, if anyone with some artistic skill feels inclined.
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A lot of those MS Office recommendations could equally well be served by a good recent dialog, overflowing to a good History and also a good bookmarks system. Slightly different tech gives you similar results, instead of pinning you bookmark and a good history goes so much further and so many other standard tools can interact and make things more powerful.
When copying from MS always think about how to embrace AND EXTEND, think of the underlying problem and the better integration we (as open source enthusiasts) can benefit from which they can only dream about.
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Hi – great app
Maybe you should contact Andreas Nilsson to have him and others give Tomboy some Tango friday love (http://ramnet.se/~nisse/blog/?p=33).
I just noticed that they did som Tomboy icons November 3rd (http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Fridays) so you may alredy be in contact with them.
Regards
/Peter
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Alan: My experimenting with history and bookmarking happens in Gimmie. You should check it out to see where I’ve tried to extend not just microsoft but many other concepts and inspirations. I’d be interested in your thoughts.
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Btw, Tomboy already has a form of history in the Table of Contents which is sorted in the order of most recently changed.
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Can I also have more than five most recently used notes listed directly in the tomboy menu?
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Yes! The patch that adds pinning also adds a GConf key to specify the minimum number of notes to show in the menu. See /apps/tomboy/menu_note_count. By default it has been bumped up to 10 from the 5 that was previously hard-coded.
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This is awesome! I tried implementing this a couple months ago and you make it look so easy.
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