Tomboy - a Lazarus rewrite

[dbannon]

Folks, some of you are almost certain to have come across Tomboy Notes in the past. It was once a a major player in Linux with quite a lot of penetration into Windows and even Mac worlds.

I am greatly pleased to announce a rewrite of Tomboy Notes, tomboy-ng, based on FPC, Lazarus and KControls. It most certainly has a long way to go in terms of stability and functionality, but does work and, as much as is possible, exactly the same way as Tomboy.

Please see https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Tomboy/tomboy-ng

Why ?
Tomboy no longer enjoys the popularity it once did. Over time, linux distro maintainers have become reluctant to include the required huge mono libraries, windows users are finding the very specific libraries necessary challenging and we have not had a working Mac version for some time.

Tomboy's user base is shrinking and the effort of maintaining its code base is becoming too much.

The FPC/Lazarus solution provides a cross platform solution once again, we hope that by using high level components we can reduce the maintenance load

I'd like to think this project may just increase FPC/Lazarus's profile a little. Its initial suggestion certainly raised a few eyebrows but what's there now proves the idea is sound. Its there, in no small measure, due to the support I received from this forum !

David

[dbannon]

Wow, this started a long time ago !

Just a brief note to tell people that tomboy-ng notes has been accepted into Debian, its now there in Bullseye and will be in the next stable release assuming nothing really nasty is found.

That means it automatically appears in distros such as Ubuntu too.

While I was questioned about the Lazarus preference for static linking I detected no discomfort due to it being built without gcc!  But Debian does have a lot of complicated rules about things like copyright and packaging. Some persistence and help from knowledgeable people within Debian (thanks Philipp !) is required.

tomboy-ng is also available for Windows and Mac (although I have not attempted an arm version yet).

https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/tomboy-ng

https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy-ng

Davo

[GAN]

Just a brief note to tell people that tomboy-ng notes has been accepted into Debian
That means it automatically appears in distros such as Ubuntu too.

Congratulations, it's not an easy task. It is also good for Lazarus/FreePascal.

Best regards.

[Ñuño_Martínez]

That are great news.  Congratulations.

[jwdietrich]

According to the English Wikipedia the software is written in C#, but the source code seems to contain FPC code and project files for Lazarus. Can you clarify this?

[devEric69]

Just a brief note to tell people that tomboy-ng notes has been accepted into Debian.
[snip]
That means it automatically appears in distros such as Ubuntu too.

Congratulations.

As an anecdote, a long time ago, I used to work with Lotus Notes (a proprietary solution consisting of some very "luxurious" e-mails clients, all operating around an internal and centralised e-mails server): it is a "groupware" tool. The company had adopted it to exchange messages (i.e. email threads per project, per idea, ...) between several remote sites connected together by a VPN. Nevertheless, the use of Lotus Notes made it necessary to have a homogeneous set of Windows workstations. And it had a big disadvantage: it notoriously slowed down Windows at times, when it decided to update the "full text index" created from all the e-mails present on a client workstation.

Knowing now tomboy-ng, I can only promote it instead of the first solution, in order to do the same basic functionality.

[ccrause]

According to the English Wikipedia the software is written in C#, but the source code seems to contain FPC code and project files for Lazarus. Can you clarify this?

There is a note under Ports mentioning tomby-ng.  It will probably be a while before all the various documents are updated to reflect the new source base.

[MarkMLl]

As an anecdote, a long time ago, I used to work with Lotus Notes (a proprietary solution consisting of some very "luxurious" e-mails clients, all operating around an internal and centralised e-mails server): it is a "groupware" tool. The company had adopted it to exchange messages (i.e. email threads per project, per idea, ...) between several remote sites connected together by a VPN. Nevertheless, the use of Lotus Notes made it necessary to have a homogeneous set of Windows workstations. And it had a big disadvantage: it notoriously slowed down Windows at times, when it decided to update the "full text index" created from all the e-mails present on a client workstation.

Knowing now tomboy-ng, I can only promote it instead of the first solution, in order to do the same basic functionality.

I played with Notes /very/ briefly, in the OS/2 era. Most of my experience has been related to sending stuff to various clients that used it, and discovering things like email bounce messages having the same ID as they one they were objecting to. Nasty.

My congratulations to the Tomboy-NG maintainers, long may she sail.

MarkMLl

[dbannon]

According to the English Wikipedia the software is written in C#, but the source code seems to contain FPC code and project files for Lazarus. Can you clarify this?

The orig Tomboy was written in Mono, GTK+, became far to hard to keep up with the GTK+ at least and the team of developers eventually just gave up.   Cross platform is very hard unless you use Lazarus !  This thread is about tomboy-ng, all Lazarus, runs, as the original did on Linux, Mac and Windows.  But the libraries it needs are either already there or pretty easy. 

Thanks for the nice things people are saying and thanks to the FPC/Lazarus developers !

Davo