Aren't Tomboy Notebooks redundant?
Boyd, don't you think that notebooks are redundant for an application that got tags already?
(Sorry, for commenting on PGO, but appearently you disabled comments for people without blogger.com account.)
Mathias Hasselmann
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Agreed. The whole point of tags is that they're less restrictive than organising things in a fixed hierarchical structure. This misses the entire point.
I prefer this to tags. If I look at how I use gmail labels for example, I use them as folders and then search.
If you have so many notes as to make it that you need a complicated "unrestricted" tag spraying free for all, perhaps you would be better off trying out search?
If I understand the approach correctly, this is an add-in that uses the tagging infrastructure internally.. Perhaps an alternative tagging UI could be implemented as well for people like yourselves who disagree.
In talking with actual users, and figuring out what kind of organization they're interested in, we found that tags were kind of useless as an organizational concept in Tomboy:
1. They don't go far enough in helping the user categorize their notes.
2. They don't really provide much added benefit in terms of searching when Tomboy already has full-text search.
However, as John says, people interested in a more traditional tagging UI could easily write an add-in (or just refactor the UI we've removed into an add-in). The tagging backend is still there and accessible to add-ins and consumers of Tomboy's DBUS interface.
Briefly, here are some ways the user wins:
1. Notebooks are a very simple concept and fit into the Tomboy metaphor.
2. Each notebook has its own customizable template for new notes (very useful if you are always writing meeting minutes, or task information, or research notes, or bug drafts, etc).
3. Basically every organizational task in Tomboy is easier when dealing with "one note, one notebook" instead of a tagging free-for-all.
Have you previously tried using tagging in Tomboy? What do you feel is lost by discarding that in favor of Notebooks?
Having used Google Notebook for a while which has implemented both labels and noteboks I think it works well.