The Desktop Annotation Zebra?
The Zebra has landed. As a part of a grander scheme I will be announcing shortly, I’ve created a small toy application;I dubbed it Daze – the Desktop Annotation Zebra.
Daze is a small note-taking/annotation tool. A bit in the spirit of Tomboy, but with a considerably smaller feature scope. Ie. if you are used to the awesomeness of Tomboy, Daze won’t exactly dazzle you (pun intended).
The idea behind Daze is to provide storage for small bits of information you really don’t want to litter around your harddisk. Preferably these bits are annotated, so you can find the original source if you ever need to.
Right now there’s no real installation of Daze, you just manually create to launchers on the panel, one for search mode and one for creating annotations (as a bonus the annotation will use the currently selected text as your new note). More details in the README.
Features:
- Uses Tracker as data storage
- Zero memory footprint (no daemon, all state is stored by Tracker)
- Create note directly from selected text
- Fast and easy searches
Known problems:
- Notes not sorted by modification time
- Ugly icons
- Searches are case sensitive
- Window sizes not stored
Download: daze-0.1.tar.gz
Important: You must be running a Tracker version at least as new as CVS of 2006-11-11. That means Tracker 0.5.1 is not good enough – your searches won’t work. Caveat emptor.
November 25th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Well I’m pretty excited about that. I’ve been looking at various desktop note/wiki/blog/diary apps and none of them seem to have it quite right. Directly using the Tracker database is a good idea. Hope just a little more fuctionality will come in the future.
November 26th, 2006 at 5:44 am
Yes there is new stuff under way, it just requires a fair bit of low level work before it is ready for prime time.
I made a tracker patch for Tomboy note indexation, when the this hits CVS Daze can essentially “import” Tomboy notes.
I have also been looking at using the Tomboy note format natively in Daze, this also means formatted text and clickable links in the text box. I’m stumped on a few problems here (namely clickable links in a gtk.TextView).
Better response times by doing everything async.
So that’s what is coming up next…
February 4th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Great project!
I’m really glad to know there’s going to be a good alternative to Tomboy.
One question: how can I delete a note I’ve created? I cna’t find it with Tracker and I don’t know where to find it to delete it manually…
February 4th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
At the moment there is no way to delete notes, but there will be in 0.2.0. Unfortunately 0.2.0 blocks on a missing triple-store API in Tracker that is scheduled withing a few weeks (the code is in Tracker, the API is just not exposed).
You cannot delete notes manually, unless you hook up to Tracker via dbus and do the nitty gritty method calls directly (scary)… The notes are completely stored in Trackers database.
February 10th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Great idea.
Are you planning on adding inter-linking between notes (wiki-style)? What about HTML formatting (which would allow URLs)?
February 10th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
zerohalo:About intercontent linking – in short no, but I have another “linking”-metaphor in mind that (hopefully) blows your minf once I get it rolling – I’m blocking on the triple-store api for Tracker atm, but Jamie says it’s coming soonish.
About urls/uris – then yes. Daze should have that.
February 25th, 2007 at 11:48 am
the link to daze-0.1.tar.gz doesn’t work..
June 30th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
I strongly hope there is a way to export the notes. Hiding them away within tracker might not preferable in some situations.
June 30th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
FartMonger: Currently Daze has no utility to do so, but it should be really trivial to make one. I have been caught up in xesam development lately so Daze has not received much live.
Moreover I have been blocking on some promised features in Tracker that have been delayed quite a bit more than I expected.
If anyone needs help dumping their notes please ping me.
December 7th, 2007 at 3:58 am
Hello. I just installed Daze and I’m trying to make some notes, but it seems I cannot save a note; this is the (error?) message I get when I push the “Create note” button:
INFO: Created note: annotation://Nota di prova.annotation
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/home/luckyland/Software/daze-0.1/daze.py”, line 267, in _create_annotation_from_ui
should_exit = self.create_annotation (self.title, self.origin, self.data)
File “/home/luckyland/Software/daze-0.1/daze.py”, line 233, in create_annotation
self.metadata.Set (”VFS Files”, uri, DAZE_ANNOTATION_CLASSES, [title, origin, data])
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus/proxies.py”, line 135, in __call__
**keywords)
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus/connection.py”, line 603, in call_blocking
message, timeout)
dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.Tracker.Error: Invalid service VFS Files or service has not been implemented yet
December 9th, 2007 at 3:35 am
@luckyland: I am not sure that Daze is compatible with the latest Tracker. I should probably update it to make it so. It should not be hard; I shall try and look at it soonish.
August 5th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
i like the way this is looking, tags should have been adopted for file storage a long time ago – and their adoption seems slow now unfortunately
Are there plans/ is there a terminal based client version of Daze?.
August 6th, 2008 at 1:34 am
@warin: Not really. I did plan to write a “note dumper” that dumps the Notes into some fileformat – mainly for easier backup, but have never got to it.
March 10th, 2009 at 3:04 am
Great tool what future enhancements are in the pipeline?
March 29th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Are you planning on adding inter-linking between notes (wiki-style)? What about HTML formatting (which would allow URLs)?
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:11 am
Hi!
I’ve read about this project in a blog.. but.. Are you stillw working or daze?
Greetings from italy,
Sergej
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
@nettscore, Mira, Sergej: Sorry, but I haven’t been working on Daze for a good while now. And given that the Tracker devs are working hard on merging the vstore branch (with RDF and Sparql support) I would rather wait until we have a Tracker with these capabilities. An app like Daze will undoubtedly make great use of these things.
On a related note you probably also know that Gnome 3.0 is being plannet and in that context it might also fare better as a plugin for the Gnome Shell…