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GNOME Journal Issue 21 is out!

The GNOME Journal team has released the latest issue, featuring five brand new articles.

We have three articles based on talks and experiences at GUADEC 2010 in The Hague and two interviews.

What are you waiting for? Go read it!

GNOME Journal is licensed under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. Translate it, podcast it, share it!

  • in GNOME
  • 2 min read

Taking Snowy for a Walk – Issue #1

“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 Sad Face

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.

  • in GNOME
  • 2 min read

Wanted: Rocking Web Design

The Tomboy Online / Snowy team needs your help! We have an alpha instance of Tomboy Online up and running thanks to the wonderful GNOME Sysadmin team and we even have some new contributors helping with Snowy’s code (hi Jeff!).

But we need help! We need help with the web design for Tomboy Online and we’ll need help implementing it.

First, the design. Here’s what we have today:

tomboy-online

(Click through to see a larger screenshot).

And that’s just the home page after you log in. We need help with how to display a note, your list of notes, and editing notes. (Hope I’m not scaring you away yet!) And that’s just off the top of my head – I’m sure there’s more that I’m missing. (Update: Sandy’s blog post shows some more screenshots, including a page with a list of notes).

Do you have wicked web design skills? Have some time to put together some mockups? Are you able to take feedback well? Then we’re looking for YOU. I don’t even care about workflow right now. You can join the Snowy mailing list, you can email me with questions, you can join us in IRC in #snowy on irc.gimpnet.org, you can blog it about it and let us know – we’d just love to see some mockups so we can then go hunting for a sucker looking for a volunteer to bring your design to life.

Manuel started work on this potential design last year and we’re looking for help to build on that or for something new. But we need help in building iterations of it and moving forward.

Tomboy Online, powered by Snowy, will be one of GNOME‘s first web services with application integration. Get the code here, learn more about our upcoming alpha here or join our mailing list here. You will be able to sync your Tomboy notes to the web using GNOME’s Tomboy Online service or your own server running Snowy. Snowy is free software licensed under the AGPL.

And thank you in advance for your help!

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

Help Needed

I need some help! I’m looking for pictures from last year’s Boston Summit. They can be anything – hallway conversations, speakers, shooting pool after the talks. Anyone have any links or photos they can share? Flickr and Google didn’t turn up a lot of results.

Thanks!

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

Make a smart playlist to see your Amazon purchases in Banshee

Jorge Castro and I were talking this morning in #banshee as Jorge asked if it was possible to create a smart playlist to see your music purchases.

And it is!

Jorge’s idea was for the UbuntuOne music store from 7digital.com. I don’t use Ubuntu, but I do buy (too many) songs from Amazon.

Amazon adds a comment in the metadata of each song you buy, such as: Amazon.com Song ID: 216030141 (If you’re curious, it’s the song Drunk Girls by LCD Soundsystem that I bought this morning for only $5!)

Create a smart playlist in Banshee by choosing from the menu Media -> New Smart Playlist.

Name your playlist (I used “Amazon”) and select “Match all of the following” and

“Comment” “contains” and enter “Amazon.com Song ID:” and press “Save“.

Voila! One smart playlist is created that shows all of your Amazon purchases. And since it’s so smart, when you buy new music it automatically updates the playlist (Yes, I bought another album this morning, don’t tell my wife). You can do the same for the UbuntuOne store using “Purchased from 7digital.com” instead of the Amazon Song ID: in the smart playlist comment.

Amazon Smart Playlist Screenshot in Banshee

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

At GUADEC

I’m a bad blogger – for the last two weeks I’ve been telling myself to write a nice “I’m going to GUADEC” post on my blog, but here I am already at GUADEC with only excuses why I didn’t. I blame Vincent!

But I’m here at GUADEC and we had a good Board meeting – it was good to see some faces I haven’t seen in a while and meet new ones. I spent most of today (had to leave a bit early to fix my phone) in the Open Desktop Day learning about large deployments of GNOME around the world.

Last year was my first GUADEC, which still is mostly a blur. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again and would love to chat – just grab me (assuming I’m not already talking to somebody!) and I’d love to hear your thoughts about how GNOME is doing, what you’re working (or I’m working on!), GNOME 3.0 or anything that else comes to mind.

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

GNOME Zazzle Store Sale

Tomorrow is the last day to save 17.76% at the GNOME Zazzle store. Zazzle is having a sale to celebrate Independence Day here in America. GUADEC is coming so now is a great time to place your order and have some cool gear to show off to all your GNOME friends in The Hague!

Collaboration Across Borders

I’ve been a bit of a distro-hopper over the last year, but as I started interviewing at Novell earlier this year I started using openSUSE so I could pretend to know what I was talking about if it came up during the interview process.

I’ve been really happy with openSUSE – each distro has their quirks but there’s a number of things (especially the openSUSE Build Service!) it does well.

I’ve also enjoyed lurking in the openSUSE GNOME community. When I’ve been stuck with something I’ve gotten quick answers and they’ve been very welcoming. (Well, except Vincent – he took one look at what I did to my laptop at the Marketing hackfest and ran away. Ok, that’s not true, he fixed it as he usually does).

One of the cool things the openSUSE community is doing is organizing the second annual openSUSE conference later this year from October 21st – 23rd in Nuremberg, Germany.

The theme is “Collaboration Across Borders” and this goes beyond just openSUSE – one of the tracks being tentatively planned is called “Cross Pollination” and the goal is to have multiple distributions and upstream projects under one roof. There will be open discussions and meetings, presentations and maybe even some hacking together. (For those of you hoping for a cagematch fight, sorry!)

Potential topics could include anything from accessibility to how to handle zealots in your community to what holds a project back to brainstorming about how closed competition might do better and how our projects can improve.

If this sounds like something you may be interested in presenting at – no matter what distribution you may use or support – distributions and upstream projects welcome! – email cfp@opensuse.org to propose a talk.

Thanks to FunkyPenguin aka awafaa for passing this along.

GNOME Docs Team meeting tomorrow

What’s that? You follow planet.gnome.org but not news.gnome.org? For shame – we have a blog for the GNOME Documentation team but I guess this once I can cross-post for you.

We’re having a meeting tomorrow at 19:00 UTC in #docs on irc.gimp.org to start planning the topics and task for GNOME 3.0. We have big things (like GNOME Shell) to document and lots of little topics to tackle as we break up the old GNOME User Guide and organize it better.

As the post on the Docs blog says – now is a great time to get involved – even if you don’t know Docbook or Mallard, the important thing is to write the new user help and we’re here to help you learn.

See you there!