Tomboy is a great little app I found recently since upgrading to Ubuntu 6.10. It is a deskbar applet–something that resides on your taskbar for quick access to programs. I started using it because it very easily helps me track my TODO lists. It also allows for linking between notes (similar to web pages), linking to emails within Evolution, highlighting (similar to wiki), and a lot more. See a complete list in Tomboy News.
Installing Tomboy:
Below are a couple of steps to quickly install it on your gnome desktop. More information found at the Tomboy Website. As far as I can tell this requires Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft).
- right-click on your taskbar
- select “Add to Panel”
- In the “Accessories” section select “Tomboy Notes”
Installing the Reminder Plugin
This plugin will allow you to include common date / time notes (as you normally might within any note) which the Reminder Plugin will then recognize and open that note on said date / time. To add the Reminder plugin follow the steps below.
- Download the latest precompiled .dll file from the Tomboy Reminder site
- cp ~/Desktop/tomboy-reminder.dll ~/.tomboy/Plugins/
- OR right-click on the Tomboy icon & select “Open Plugins Folder”
- copy the tomboy-reminder.dll into this folder (Not the “Default Plugins” folder)
NOTE: you must restart the panel for it to take effect the first time. In a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) type: ‘killall gnome-panel‘
Using the Reminder Plugin
To use this plugin simply write a note and when you want to be reminded for this note you have a few options.
- put a “!” somewhere followed by a date at which Tomboy will show a popup with the note content at the specified date or time. OR
- write “remind {date}”, “alert {date}” or “rappel {date}” within the note.
The date format is quite loose. You should be able to write any date / time format as you normally would in regular conversation. If not it should be a bug, please report such to the developers.
- 4th july
- 2006/11/15
- 5th
- 3 september 06
- next monday
- thursday
- 12am
- 23:35
- 10h
- 10h am
- 3 july at 12pm
- monday @ 2h pm
A few notes about the behavior of the note popup system
- When a date is found the note will popup on that date starting at 00:00 and every 30min until the note / reminder is removed.
- When a time is found the note will popup at the given time on the day you created the note, once.
- When a date and time are found the note will popup at the given time, on the given date, only once.
Technorati Tags: tomboy, gnome, todo, reminder, note-taking
Thank you for this howto! 🙂
No problem. I’m a big fan of Tomboy and hope to be able to offer a lot of support for it on Ubuntu in the future.
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Hello. First, thanks for the tutorial. Very helpful and well written.
I’m having an issue, though, and am hoping someone here can help. In short, I’ve installed the plug-in successfully but the software doesn’t appear to be triggering the reminder / alarm event.
I’m running Ubuntu 7.10. I pulled the dll down and installed it in the appropriate directory. I’ve rebooted and ‘bounced’ the panel. The add-in shows up in the list of add-ins and I have enabled it. I’ve put a date into an existing Tomboy note as follows:
Remind 04/24/2008 at 10:00 AM
I close the note and continue working, but nothing happens at the specified date / time. Any thoughts?
@Dave:
From the README (which should be read, hence the name ;o)
‘You can NOT use the “american” or “european” date format “mm/dd/yyyy”
or “dd/mm/yyy” because it is not clear wether the first two digits are
months or days.’
Great product, this page has been great help
I'm on Ubuntu 9.4 it seems only to work when I put "Alert" then date or time, but I do get a yellow high light of the Alert and date/time,
if you are having porblems try to put on new line not with bullet like — Alert at 10:20 or Alert 26th Aug at 9:30 if you are having problems. It now works for me