Tomdroid: Sync Tomboy Notes With Your Android Device

Well, this is not new but I've somehow missed the news. Anyway, I was reading on the Launchpad blog that you can use Tomboy Notes on your Android device. The app is called "Tomdroid" and it supports note syncing between your desktop computer and Android device.

But there's a catch: Tomdroid is read-only for now meaning you can only read the notes and can't create new notes on your Android phone. But the application is still in beta so there's still hope it will support editing / creating new notes too.

How to set up Tomboy Notes and Tomdroid to sync your notes

Tomboy Notes (on your computer): go to the Tomboy Notes Preferences and on the "Synchronization" tab select "Tomboy Web" under Service, then click the Authorize button. This will open a page where you must enter your Ubuntu One (Launchpad) username and password. Once the authorization finishes, click "Save" in the Tomboy Notes preferences.

Tomdroid (on your Android device): open the Settings and click "Service", then "Authentificate":

This will work just like with the desktop Tomboy Notes: a web page will open where you must enter your username and password, then enter a name for this device and you're ready:

Tomdroid uses Launchpad for bug tracking, questions, etc. so... well, you know what to do ;)

You can find Tomdroid @ Android Market.

Tomdroid: Sync Tomboy Notes With Your Android Device

Well, this is not new but I've somehow missed the news. Anyway, I was reading on the Launchpad blog that you can use Tomboy Notes on your Android device. The app is called "Tomdroid" and it supports note syncing between your desktop computer and Android device.

But there's a catch: Tomdroid is read-only for now meaning you can only read the notes and can't create new notes on your Android phone. But the application is still in beta so there's still hope it will support editing / creating new notes too.

How to set up Tomboy Notes and Tomdroid to sync your notes

Tomboy Notes (on your computer): go to the Tomboy Notes Preferences and on the "Synchronization" tab select "Tomboy Web" under Service, then click the Authorize button. This will open a page where you must enter your Ubuntu One (Launchpad) username and password. Once the authorization finishes, click "Save" in the Tomboy Notes preferences.

Tomdroid (on your Android device): open the Settings and click "Service", then "Authentificate":

This will work just like with the desktop Tomboy Notes: a web page will open where you must enter your username and password, then enter a name for this device and you're ready:

Tomdroid uses Launchpad for bug tracking, questions, etc. so... well, you know what to do ;)

You can find Tomdroid @ Android Market.

The Board Finally Gets A PPA [Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Only]

The Board is a place for quick access to notes, photos, videos, audio and more. It's really hard to describe what The Board really is so take a look at the video below:

Please note that this is an older video demoing text selection in The Board.

Because The Board is still experimental, it was quite hard to try it out but installing it in Ubuntu just got a whole lot easier thanks to the packaging done by Robert Ancell and a PPA set up Lucas Rocha (The Board developer).

Install The Board in Ubuntu 11.04

Before adding the PPA, please note that this is still experimental (it may crash, explode or not run at all) and it will only work in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. The Board didn't play too nice with Unity running in VirtualBox so it's probably best to only try it if you're running Ubuntu 11.04 on your computer (and not in VirtualBox).

To be able to in stall The Board, you must firstly enable the Universe repository. To do this, open Synaptic Package Manager, go to Settings > Repositories and enable it on the "Ubuntu Software" tab.

Add the PPA and install The Board in Ubuntu 11.04 using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:the-board-team/dev-snapshots
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install the-board

Now you should be able to start The Board from the Unity menu (Dash).

Oh, and here's a screenshot with The Board running in VirtualBox - not a pretty thing to watch but that's because of VirtualBox:

The Board currently doesn't integrate very well with either Unity or Gnome Shell but The Board is still experimental so this will definitely improve in the future.

Lucas also mentions that you can try The Board using the GNOME 3 Live CD. Download it from HERE.

Thanks to lucasr.org for all the info; Screenshot credits: Lucas Rocha.

Evernote For Linux: Nevernote

Evernote is an service/application you can use to store notes, images and all kind of information (like audio, handwritten or video notes) for retrieving later. It supports search and tagging and most importantly: you can sync everything between computers - further more, Evernote supports mobile devices too like iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry or Android and there's a web interface too and a clipping bookmarklet to pull anything into your netbook. But unfortunately there's no official Evernote application for Linux.

Nevernote is an open source clone of Evernote that works on Linux. While Evernote now runs on Linux through Wine, the application is quite slow so you may want to try Nevernote.

Nevernote supports most of the Evernot features so you can easily drag and drop images or PDF files, tag or preview notes. Unfortunately, there are some features which are not supported by Nevernote: you can't write ink notes or record webcam notes, there is no screen clipper (but you can use Shutter instead!), emailing only sends a plain text note and also the sharing feature is missing.

On the other hand, there are also quite a few features that Nevernote provides which are not available in Evernote, such as: changing the background or title of any note, highlight text, encrypt the database at the database level to improve security, theme support, display PDF files inline or as a file icon you can click later, rotate images, close netbooks and many more.

(Nevernote displays PDFs inline)

Further more, Nevernote supports customizing shortcuts, but not through the user interface. To see how you can configure the keyboard shortcuts (there are already some default keyboard shortcuts so you only need to do this if you want to change them), download the Nevernote source, extract it and in nevernote/usr/share/nevernote read the "shortcuts_howto.txt" file. There are also some example shortcuts in the same folder ("shortcuts_sample.txt").

Nevernote would be enough and I wouldn't miss any Evernote feature if only it would look better - there's always the web interface / bookmarklet for most of the other stuff I need. Because Nevernote is written in Java / Qt, it doesn't integrate well with the Gnome desktop and looks... let's call it "weird" (I'm being nice here). But don't get me wrong, Nevernote is actually great - or at least better then using the Evernote client under Wine, as long as you only want to take text notes and insert some files and get them synchronized with Evernote. If you want more, you're out of luck for now.

On the other hand, Evernote for Windows doesn't look too good when used on Linux either:

Hopefully Nevernote will integrate better in the future or who knows, we might even get Evernote for Linux.

Note: to get Nevernote to synchronize your notes with Evernote you'll have to go to Edit > Preferences and under "Connection", enter your Evernote userid and password and select a sync interval (I also suggest selecting "Automatic Connect" and "Synchronize on Shutdown").

Download Nevernote (includes .deb and .rpm files)


Update: Nevernote now has an Ubuntu PPA!

Have you tried Nevernote or Evernote under Wine? Which do you like best?