XNotesNG

SourceForge has posted an edited version of the email-interview I did with them.  Still a decent write up.  Thanks to the SourceForge team for the exposure!

After a long delay I’ve finally released XNotesNG 4.0.  Packaged binaries are available for various distros.  Sourceforge.net is going to post a blog about the project – they interviewed me by email yesterday.  As of this moment it isn’t published, however.

Grab it.  Try it.  Develop with it.  Let me know what you think.

Update:  2010-04-29

Lee Schlesinger just wrote to say the Sourceforge community blog entry will go up May 12th.

All the major rewrites are complete and tested.  There are still a few minor bugs that can wait for post 4.0 and these are in the issue tracker on Sourceforge.  I’ve added builds for both RPM and Debian packaging, the latter to make Ubuntu users happy, even if I’m a stout Fedora guy.

All that’s left is to push the packages, source and and make release announcements.

I think I should mention some of my goals for XNotesNG.  First, the current CVS tree is missing many of the features of the old XNotesPlus because of the port from C/GTK+ to Java/SWT is not complete.  Second, I don’t have a need for integration with my Palm Pilot anymore since I don’t use it.  But I do want to finish the calendar and then add a TimeTracker since I need it at work.

After that there are lots of possibilities.  The wiki has lots of information on this.  The current work page lists much of what I’m working on right now.  This includes a simple update to SWT 3.5 that will allow me to integrate a search box to the notes and a list of features that some users of the Boulder Linux Users Group mentioned they wanted to see in a note program.  There are also some much older (and probably out of date) ideas on the Pre-4.0 plans page.

There are lots of places this can go.  With a plugin interface I would like to encourage external projects that can install under XNotesNG as add-ons.  I’d love to see an implementation of Centipede added, just for fun.

Other ideas include

• Converting the simple menu to an iPod like browser to find apps.
• Adding a network sync option to allow multiple instances of XNotesNG running for a single user on different systems to stay in sync with notes and other apps via a centralized server or perhaps a P2P type interaction.
• Make a much better splash image.  You’d think the Graphics Muse would know how to do that, but it’s just getting around to it that’s the problem.
• Integrating a browser that can connect to remote virtual machines.  I have ideas on how to do this based on my day job, but that’s for much later.

There are many other ideas that would be cool to think about.  For now, I just need to finish what I have under Current Work and get some other developers involved.

The initial checkin to CVS was incomplete.  I’m not sure what happened but the com/ximba/xnotesng/core directory didn’t get imported.  I’ve fixed that now so the cvs checkouts should be complete.  I’ve done a complete checkout, build and test and everything appears to be working.

Just to be save I’m hanging onto my old CVS tree in case something else turns up missing.  If anyone notices missing code, please post to one of the forums (see the support link).

This post marks the open development of XNotesNG.  This project has long been a pet project of the original developer, Michael J. Hammel.  Now, I open it up for public consumption and contribution.  If I can manage it, that is.

For details on the project development status, check out the wiki.

To obtain installable packages and source code releases, visit the Download page.