Tomboy was one of the first GNOME products I contributed code (documentation) to. It also is one of my all time favorite apps and one I can’t do without on a day to day basis. Whether it’s jotting down ideas I don’t want to forget, to-do lists, or organizing the release plan for the next GNOME Journal, I always have a bunch of notes open.

A few weeks ago, I finally got around to trying to sync my notes via sshfs on my desktop and laptop. And, to be frank, it was a pain in the butt, and not documented well. It’s working, but I don’t think it’s working quite right yet.

Which is why I couldn’t be more excited for Snowy. Snowy is a web application for synchronizing, viewing, sharing, and editing your Tomboy notes online. Snowy will power the Tomboy Online service, and in addition to syncing your own notes online, let you also share and edit with friends.

Best of all, Snowy will be Affero GPL licensed – so if you want to run your own Snowy server and sync your notes there, you can! (It’s similar to identi.ca – laconica is the open source software that powers identi.ca, and you could run your own microblog server on laconica if you wanted to).

I recommend reading Sandy Armstrong’s (lead developer of Tomboy) blog post on Tomboy and Snowy (including an early screenshot), and Brad Taylor’s (lead developer of Snowy) blog post introducing Snowy. (And the title of this blog post is stolen right from Brad’s mouth).

More to come!