“I steal from every movie ever made.” – Quentin Tarantino

Like Quentin, I’m stealing from Frederic Peters’ recent “Shell Yes!” blog post and am going to try and bring you, our loyal reader, semi-regular updates on what’s going on in the world of Snowy development as we work towards launching Tomboy Online.

Jeff Schroeder patched Snowy this week using, as he puts it, “Shiney django admin stuff” to not allow users who are not in the upcoming alpha and beta to sync their notes. Users will instead see something similar to this:

Snowy could use some design love, so we blogged about that and created a Designer Playground on the wiki. Add your mockups and we’re looking for help if you can make those mockups come to life!

We created a mailing list that users can opt-in to for Tomboy Online news, release announcements and non-development type stuff.

OpenID support for creating accounts and logging in received some love. When completed, it will look similar to what bitbucket uses from a UI perspective.

We’re also working on creating a proposal to send to the GNOME Board to have a Snowy hackfest. We are discussing the goals of what we want to accomplish, who can come, where to have it and when. If you’re interested, join the mailing list, now is a great time to get involved!

Lastly, we’re hoping to launch the Snowy alpha test with a handful (and I really mean a handful) of testers on September 13th. For more information, we wrote a FAQ on the upcoming alpha test, which is required reading – there will be a test next time! After the first invites go out, we hope to add more participants weekly as we work towards an open beta. Alpha testers will be expected to file bugs, give feedback and pay to be in the beta.

Did you know? TinTin was Tomboy’s first icon / logo in GNOME on the panel.