Andrew Jorgensen
It's better than bad, it's good!

Hack Week Two - Day 5

day-5.jpeg Numbers dwindle at Hack Week on the 5th floor of Novell Provo

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 for openSUSE 10.3 1-Click

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.

tasky.pngtasky-prefs.png

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.