It’s been a good week. Reportedly last year’s Hack Week was more… enthusiastic. Hopefully this isn’t the last one. I got a handful of little things done and gave a shot at a couple of others.

Giver on Mono.Zeroconf

Giver, a simple file sharing application, was written against avahi-sharp for service discovery. This means it can only be used on a system that runs Avahi (which excludes SLED 10, Mac, and Windows). Using avahi-sharp can also be error-prone because you have to write your own event handlers and resolver thread. Aaron Bockover recently released a DNS-SD abstraction library called Mono.Zeroconf (which has actually been used for some time in Banshee). I ported Giver to Mono.Zeroconf. In theory this should mean that Giver can run on SLED 10 now and could be more easily ported to Mac and Windows. I’ll have a go at getting it to build on SLED 10 next week.

Tasky

Tasky is a simple task management app (TODO list) for the Linux Desktop and probably this year’s best hack week project. Aside from being a pretty sweet app it has a back-end to synchronize to Remember The Milk. Let it be understood that I am not claiming a developer role. I did the packaging for it, put it in the openSUSE Build Service, and got it ready for submission to SuSE for inclusion in future distributions.

Tomboy Remote

Wade Berrier has been working on an sqlite data-store for Tomboy (some of that work was already done). He got some criticism from a user who likes to look at his notes from the command-line while logged in remotely. I wrote a simple console application called tomboy-remote that can list and search your notes, show you a specific note, and allow you to safely edit a note. It should be trivial to add other features. Underneath it uses Tomboy’s D-Bus interface. This requires that Tomboy be running already but Boyd Timothy and I have talked about turning Tomboy into a D-Bus-activated service with a separate front-end.

Update: A short screencast is available.