[tomboy-list] C clone of Tomboy for Maemo

[Sandy Armstrong]

On 03/24/2009 03:13 AM, Cornelius Hald wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I'm currently writing a Tomboy clone in C, targeting the embedded
> Maemo[1] platform. The reason is, that I want the great Tomboy
> functionality on my internet tablet (Nokia N810). I really would love to
> use the original Tomboy-Maemo[2] port, but unfortunately the startup
> time is too long (about 15 seconds) and the memory consumption of mono
> is too high for having it always run in the background. This device has
> only 128 MB Ram...

I did not realize Mono performance was so bad on Maemo; that's a shame. 
  Sounds like your work could be very helpful to some.

> The project is far from finished, but it is already possible to read,
> write and display notes which are compatible with Tomboy 0.12.0 from my
> desktop machine.
>
> I hope to be able to make a first release at the end of this week, but
> first I have some questions, where you hopefully can help me with:
>
> 1) Is there a description of the Tomboy XML format? The link to the
> XML-Namespace seems to be dead. I'm asking because I want to make sure
> to be compatible with Tomboy. So far I have only a reverse engineered
> version and maybe I missed some tags etc...

An XML Namespace URI does not have to be a valid URL, so that is not 
supposed to be a link, really.  If you look in our mailing list archives 
or in bugzilla, you'll see that some people have worked on a XML schema 
which might be helpful...I have yet to review it.

> 2) Is the "version" attribute of<note>  actively maintained? So is there
> some document that describes the XML formats of old versions? And which
> version of Tomboy was using which version of the XML file? Version
> 0.12.0 on my desktop creates version="0.3" documents.

No, we are not documenting that at this time.  There has never been a 
need because there has never been another consumer of the note files 
that cared.  That being said, new versions usually just add features, so 
a parser of 0.1 notes would be able to read 0.3 notes just fine, it just 
wouldn't see the note tags and a couple of other things.

> 3) I have to choose a name and I came up with "Conboy". C because of the
> programming language and the rest has something to do with my name
> (*cough*) and with Tomboy of course... As this name is very close to the
> name "Tomboy" I thought I should get your OK on that. As I'm not very
> creative with names other suggestions are welcome too.

Well, to be honest I don't think that's a very good name. :-)  But I'm 
not great with names, either.  I'll let you know if anything comes to 
mind.  I have no problem with you using "Conboy"...I'll have to think if 
it would be a problem for me if you used "CTomboy" or something like that.

> 4) Are there other things I should be aware of? Especially concerning
> the file format?

Add-ins may add undocumented XML tags or attributes.  Keep an eye out 
for that sort of thing.

Best,
Sandy