Although I won't be going into details about Tomboy but since I "created" few words already... this is actually a pretty impressive little utility. For instance, we can create unlimited titles (new notes) for taking notes and while typing a new one, if one of the words happened to be an exact match for the already existing "title", then Tomboy will automatically create a click-able link! (URL) which makes finding "related" information easy.
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| When I typed "Ubuntu One", Tomboy automatically linked it to the already existing Note (Title) that goes by that name... |
You can highlight content, change the text size, italic/bold, search for words, etc... and using its plug-in (they call it "Addins") API, we can expand the features by adding new add-ons as well.
So, applications like these are very useful while taking quick notes before you forget 'em (especially dudes like me with dull brains :) ).
Anyhow, if you use Tomboy quite heavily and also want to share those notes with others often, then there's nothing much Tomboy can do for you. Although you can use Ubuntu One, the free "cloud" account and sync your data to it but within the cloud, you cannot share the information easily like in a network.
So what can be done here?
Well, you can use free online pastebin services which let you upload Text files (somewhat related to Cloud computing, don't you think) and give you a URL back for the location of that stored Text file so others can access it via that URL.
But, wouldn't it be really nice if we could just use one of those Tomboy add-ins that would let use easily sync our notes into those online pastebin services within its GUI so we don't have to open up the web browser and enter the URL, etc...
Well the problem was that there wasn't none. But thanks to the developer Michael Hall, now we have "that" addin!.
He calls it Tomboy-pastebinit. You can easily install this add-on for Tomby in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal (may work on other Ubuntu Linux versions, I guess).
First we have to install the command-line tool (which this addin is based on) called "pastebinit". To do that, open your Terminal and enter the below commands.
sudo apt-get install pastebinit
Then download this DLL file and simply copy the file to the folder (as in below screenshot) in your :
"Home" -> ".config" -> "tomboy" -> "addins"
Now, you have to exit Tomboy, completely (from the notification area) and restart it to work. But that didn't work for me. I had to enable it from the Tomboy "preference" window.
To do that, open Tomboy and from the Menu choose: "Edit" - "Preference" and from the window that opens up, click on the "Add-ins" tab and then click on "Tools" and choose "Paste Bin It 0.1" and click on the "Enable" button as shown in the below screenshot.
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| Finally, something worth taking a "note" :)... |
Now whenever you want to use the pastebin service in Tomboy GUI, click on the "Tools" icon and from the menu, to the end, you'll see that which says "Paste Bin It!". That's it. Oh, btw, it uses the Ubuntu Paste-bin service (update:- actually it seems that this addin by default uses the "assigned" service by that command line tool, so depending on your distribution... the pastbin service might change) .
And again, big thanks to Michael who made this possible.
Thanks for the write-up, I just wanted to clarify a couple of points. First of all, you'll need to have the 'pastebinit' command line client (written by Stephane Graber) installed to use this plugin. Second, it uses that command's default pastebin service, which is paste.ubuntu.com on Ubuntu systems, but would be different on other systems.
ReplyDelete@Michael,
ReplyDeleteThank you. Yes I had installed pastebinit before, so forgot about it... I have updated the post. Again, thank you for the information and the add-in :D.