Re: Tomboy in Desktop

[Alex Graveley <alex beatniksoftware com>]

Hi,

To the first quoted point, I don't recall ever rejecting Sticky Note 
import.  Quite the contrary, I've advocated that we use a first-run 
import wizard to aid migration.

Serendipitously, in recent days, most of the major work for importing 
has been contributed by Sanford Armstrong in the form of a Tomboy 
plugin.  Sanford's patch adds an item to the Tools menu labeled "Import 
from Sticky Notes".  But as this is perhaps not the nicest or most 
discoverable mechanism I'm trying to figure out how to best integrate 
this code for a nice experience.  Comments welcome.

To the second point, I have received very mixed response to the question 
of Tomboy's replacing of Sticky Notes.  And we can see that mails to 
this list have expressed both points of view, with a slight bias towards 
the two coexisting (especially from those who actually use one tool or 
the other).

I place myself in the coexist camp, mostly because the interaction 
models among the two tools are very different (again, Tomboy ain't 
sticky).  A user who is used to Sticky Notes would be very confused if 
forced to use Tomboy, and vice versa.

However, if the release committee believes that enforcing a single 
note-taking approach is what is best for the desktop, I think it makes 
sense to choose the solution which is novel, more scalable wrt the 
number of notes, less intrusive on user activity, supports richer note 
content, and which opens up possibilities for integration with other 
parts of the desktop.

-Alex

Jeff Waugh wrote:
>  * Alex says that Tomboy doesn't replace Sticky Notes, he doesn't really
>    want to migrate Sticky Notes data into Tomboy, and that Tomboy and Sticky
>    Notes suit different use cases.
>
>  * In my experience, users perceive Tomboy and Sticky Notes to fulfill the
>    same (or similar) function.