Where is Ploum ?

Short version : GTG! 0.2 is out

Last year, I met several times with my friend Bertrand to discuss how we imagine a good GTD tasks manager. On October 17 2008, Bertrand told me that he had a funny idea for a name and I immediately created the project and commited my first try with a GTK TextView widget.

2 months later (exactly one year ago), what we had was a kind of buggy monstrous experiment.

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He wanted to be a GNOME rock star, he didn't know the price to pay.

He heard that sleeping with big guys was the only way to succeed, he didn't believe it.

The fact that there was no more twin beds room in the hotel was unexpected…

Introducing the innocent Ploum and the Nasty Desrt in a new Mountain View based horror comedy :

Soon in the theater : In bed with Ryan Lortie II, featuring not-so-innocent Vuntz and still-naughty Desrt in Dallas.

Gpager is a GPLv2 libwnck pager that just float on your desktop, allowing you to do anything you were doing with you panel pager but bigger and stronger.

Back in 2005-2006, my good friend Patrick Rácz developed a small pager for the GNOME desktop. Since then, I've been an happy user of this little application, recompiling it with every Ubuntu release. In fact, I just cannot live without it anymore.

We thought that it might be helpful to other and, for years, we said : "we should publish it". Today, after fixing some small bugs, I'm proud to announce the release of Gpager 0.3 "Scenes From a Memory - Finally Free". I created a Launchpad project and even an Ohloh page.

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I cannot live anymore without Wikipedia. Each time I'm discussing a random subject with somebody and that a question pops into my head, I think "Let's look on Wikipédia" before realizing that I'm in the Big Room with the Big Blue Roof, not in front of my computer.

Nevertheless, I don't have a Wikipedia account. I don't see the need for it. Sure, it could be useful for others, but I don't think I'm really good at writing encyclopedia stuffs, I don't find it funny at all and I believe that I'm already doing some useful stuffs. I don't want yet another account, I don't want a password nor statistics.

Of course, I was correcting mistakes when reading them, I was sometimes adding one or two sentences because my knowledge of the page's subject was enough. I even created a few "stubs" when I thought it was missing. Some of them became real well-formatted Wikipedia pages afterward.

It was back in those days…

I don't do that anymore.

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Each year, Google is sponsoring a Summer of Code (SoC). During three months, Google pay students to work on various opensource projects. Each student should be followed by a "mentor" from the original project but the mentor is not paid, he receives a tshirt.

3 years ago, I was a SoC student and developed the now abandoned Conseil but I learned a lot from that experience.

This year, one of the GNOME SoC projects was related to Getting Things GNOME!, the software I started with Bertrand. The project was to add the concept of geolocalization to your tasks list so you would be able to see where you can do tasks. The candidate, Paulo Cabido, seemed bright and skilled. I was the mentor. Strange to be on the other side of the fence.

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The biggest issue when talking about usability is that people tend to be used to what they get, even if sub-optimal. And because they are used to it, they will never question the validity of the current model and, worst, they will fight loudly against any change. That's why I'm so pleased when someone come with an out-of-the-box idea.

Just think about a machine that will need input. Add lot of buttons, more than one hundred, nearly all of the same size and color. Spread those buttons in a total random order, without even aligning them. That's it, you have the most widely used human-machine input mechanism : the keyboard !

Scary, isn't it ?

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Part 1 : Introduction
Part 2 : Home is Desktop
Part 3 : There's no tray icon in GNOME !

Repeat after me one more time : there's no such thing as a "tray icon" in GNOME. GNOME has a notification area which has nothing to do with the Windows-ish obscenity called "systray", this little space where any application can put a little icon.

I mean, seriously, have you ever think about how completely stupid is the idea of a "tray icon"? Can you imagine how black magic it should be for a new computer user?

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As I previously pointed out, there's a huge need to have a clear distinction between the user preferences and the user data. This is already covered by the FreeDesktop XDG folders specification.

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Bertrand and I are very proud to announce you the first release of Getting Thing Gnome!, a personal organizer and todo list manager for the GNOME desktop.

GTG allows you to add and edit tasks with nearly no fields at all. It support subtasks and tags that you can use the way you want. It aims for flexibility. Getting Things Gnome! goal is to adapt itself to your workflow, not the opposite. GTG also brings the concept of "workview", a display of tasks that can be done right now, right here.

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Alone. The sensors of my crashed ship were formal : there was no lifeform on this planet. Not a single drop of water, just a giant desert of dunes. I was alone beneath a splendid sky of unknown stars and I started to name them while walking, toes in the sand. I was talking loudly, pointing my finger at those new constellations.
- Here is the VersionControlTroll ! There the TextEditorFlamewar !
Suddenly, my body was stopped and the shock sent me to the ground.
- Please, pay attention while walking.
- Sorry, I replied.
I rose and continued :
- And this one will be the UselessBlogMeme...


This is my first drabble attempt as an answer to Scott's post. The are lot of other participants but pay attention, some are cheating with their word count ! This is my current favourite but I would have replaced the last "heads" word by "hackergotchies".