Ex-Novell developer releases port of Tomboy

By Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 15 April 2009 08:34

Technology

A software developer who was sacked by Novell in the first quarter of this year has begun porting Tomboy, one of two Mono-dependent applications which is part of the GNOME desktop, to C++/Gtkmm.
Hubert Figuiere , who is based in Canada, says this has nothing to do with Mono at all, though he is admittedly not a fan of the .NET clone which has been developed by Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza.

The port of Tomboy is called Gnote.

Figuiere made the first commit on March 12. The project is hosted on a site known as Gitorious.

He said he decided to port Tomboy because he uses it and could not accommodate Mono on his little netbook due to space problems.

"I have an Asus EEE PC Surf with 2GB of Flash (the lower end model, even lower than the basic EEE PC 701) and I have been trying to fit into it an openSUSE 11.1 with GNOME," Figuiere said.

"To that end, I removed as much as I deemed unnecessary; this included Mono which is not a small chunk at all, and Python-GNOME.

"Also I have been wanting to know how easy it was to port Gtk# code to C++/Gtkmm for my personal curiosity. So I chose an application I was using and thought would make sense to have on the netbook. It was Tomboy."

Asked whether he planned to port any other Mono-dependent applications like F-Spot and gtwitter to C++/Gtkmm, Figuiere said his porting of Tomboy had nothing to do with Mono.

"People have been carrying on with an anti-Mono diatribe. I'm known to not be a fan of Mono, but for the same reason I'm not a fan of Python or Java," he said.

"As for now I have no plan to do another 'port', as I will rather focus on finishing Gnote, and go forward with the development of my digital photo management application. Unless somebody wants to pay me for it."