At this point of your life you should know about Getting Things Gnome! and how easy it makes your life!

A port of GTG for android is in my perspective far a way as there is no native python support, etc. So how can you have your GTG tasks on your android phone?

Easy!

1. Signup for a (free) Remember The Milk account
2. Activate GTG’s Remember The Milk plugin and sync your tasks with RTM
3. Install Astrid on your android phone (available on android market)
4. Sync Astrid with RTM

Signup for a (free) Remember The Milk account
Remember The Milk allows you to manage your tasks online. Just go to http://www.rememberthemilk.com and signup for a (free) account.

Activate GTG’s Remember The Milk plugin and sync your tasks with RTM
Thanks to Luca Invernizzi’s GTG plugin, Remember The Milk, it’s possible to sync GTG with Remember The Milk. The plugin is currently at version 0.3.

Plugin for synchronising Getting Things Gnome! with the web service Remember the milk  (http://www.rememberthemilk.com)
Please note that task descriptions are not synchronized in this version.
Legal note: This product uses the Remember The Milk API but
is not endorsed or certified by Remember, The Milk.

Luca’s RTM plugin is shipped with GTG so if you have the latest version you only need to activate the plugin.

Activate GTG's RTM plugin

After activating the plugin you only need to sync the tasks between GTG and RTM.

Sync tasks between GTG and RTM

Install Astrid on your android phone (available on android market)
This step is actually very easy. Just open the Android Market and search for Astrid and install it.

Sync Astrid with RTM
Open Astrid and in the Synchronization menu Activate the Remember The Milk service and also activate the Main Menu Shortcut.

Astrid's Sync menu

The Sync shortcut in the main menu comes up handy to sync Astrid with RTM with minimum effort. Then all you need is to hit the sync button.

Astrid & RTM Sync in action

That’s it. This is as simple as it can get. No more excuses for not being organized!

One more thing, by default Remember The Milk will send email notification of tasks on their deadline and it’s also a nice feature to have.

I’ll leave you guys with one more screen shot of the Astrid’s home widget that also comes in handy.

Astrid's home screen widget

Finally and for the just for those of you who are wondering, I’m using…

• … Getting Things Gnome! development version (latest trunk version)
• … CyanogenMod 4.2.14.1. I also suggest a look at http://www.openandroidteam.com for the latest android version (2.1_r2).

That’s it! Getting Things Gnome! 2.0, code name “Gorignak”, was released this week!

I won’t duplicate the release post, it’s a great post and you can read it here!

Today I just had to code. For days I’ve been studying for my last exams (I hope!). Kevin Mehall made me the suggestion to add a preferences button on the dialog manager in order to allow a user to set the preferences/configure a plugin. The idea is based on the Gedit system. I think I never gave credit to Gedit but I actually based allot of things on their plugin system.

It looks like this:

You can read about it and how to make your plugin configurable in the plugin howto along with all the other info.

As requested and discussed before I made a notification area plugin for GTG. This allows you to click on the notification area icon to “minimize” GTG. It also has a small context menu. Keep in mind that if you minimize GTG it will minimize normally (it will not “disappear”), this plugin does not change GTG’s UI or how it works.

Anyway You should read Lionel’s article on “There’s no tray icon in GNOME!“. It is a MUST READ!

The plugin is available in the current development branch.

I made some documentation for my work that I had not yet advertised, so here are the links:

• How to make a plugin for Getting Things Gnome! : Learn how to make a plugin here
• Geolocalized-tasks plugin for Getting Things Gnome! : See how to install and use the plugin
• python-geoclue : A python module that provides a nice api for Geoclue

For the past two/three days I’ve been fighting with video in linux to make a screencast. I found out that recordmydesktop didn’t work in any of my computers (it was always so slow!). I finally got it to work in a old laptop, a compaq evo n1020v and was able to record the plugin working.
After that I had another challenge, to edit the four small videos into the final video and finally to be able to use the html5 video tag I had to add the ogg mime types to apache’s config.
Well.. the result was this video (still a little sluggish, the next one will be better):

For those that don’t have a html5 compatible browser, here is the youtube link or the direct link to the ogg video.

There are still some glitches in the plugin but in a general way it works ok. More features are coming soon!

This week I worked with libchamplain and added it to the GTG! geolocalized-tasks plugin that I’m making. I have a working version as planned. It’s now possible to add a location to a task or view a task (that has a defined location) on the map. It will have some more features in a few days. Some images of libchamplain + geoclue + GTG! in action:

A quick explanation (each point corresponds to a image):

1. The button Set/View location is added to the task editor window;
2. Viewing the task’s location on the map. This task (as you can see on the first image) has three tags, two of them with location and on of the tags that has a location doesn’t have a color set so that gray is the default color;
3. A task with a tag named “CGE” with the color attribute defined to pink and with the location defined. Because the task has already a location defined, it only shows the location;
4. A task that doesn’t have tags (so no location). Using geoclue (pygeoclue) the markers position is set to the current location. It’s also possible to move the marker around to the desired position. There is a gtk.entry to define the tag’s name;
5. This task has tags but no location is defined. Again, using geoclue the markers position is set to the current location. Now it’s possible to create a new tag to associate with the location or to associate the location to a existing tag;

Some new features will be available in the next days along with a screencast.

Learning libchamplain was a challenge, I had some problems and spent allot of time figuring out how to solve them but the libchamplain team was wonderful and help me thru the problems, many thanks to Victor and Pierre-Luc!

So this week I:

• added libchamplain to geolocalized-tasks plugin in GTG!
  • learned how clutter/libchamplain works
  • tested and experimented with the python bindings (view, layers and markers mostly)
  • coded an example (demo in python) of how to change a marker’s position on the map. The demo is available here: http://paulocabido.com/soc/libchamplain/move_marker.py
• fixed several bugs in the plugin-engine

All the code (plugin + plugin-engine) is available at my plugin-engine branch: https://code.launchpad.net/~pcabido/gtg/plugin-engine

I’m glad to be working with the GTG! community, it’s growing real fast! This week, Getting Things Gnome! 0.1.2 was released.

More screenshots here.
For the curious ones a review of GTG! made by Ryan Paul is available here. There are still lots of new features coming up! Anyone that wants to join us, feel free to do it at IRC (gimp net at #gtg).

I just received an e-mail from Google notifying me that I have successfully passed the Midterm Evaluations. I already knew that I was going to pass but the confirmation is always good.

In week 7 I mainly worked on the python-geoclue module. A list of the module’s features are available here.
I also made a test file to test the module’s features and added the setup to install the module.
Suggestions to improve the module are welcome! I already got the suggestion to add gobject-introspection support, so keep those suggestions coming!
The code is available at https://code.launchpad.net/~pcabido/+junk/pygeoclue.

I updated the wiki page that I left behind on the past weeks and created a page (http://live.gnome.org/gtg/soc/whatihavelearned) that is kind of a general report of what I done until now. The idea is to share what I have learned and it is intended to be allot more technical than it is now. It is also a good starting point for all the documentation that I’ll have to do.

Now I’m starting to work with libchamplain. I plan to have a working plugin with geoclue+libchamplin by the end of this week.
All of this part of my work is available here: https://code.launchpad.net/~pcabido/gtg/plugin-engine

On week three I accomplished an important part of the project, that was to have by the end of the week a “working prototype” of the plug-in engine. Its not complete but the difficult part and the part where I was (very) confused is done.
Plug-ins are loading and working. Briefly, the system is divided into three parts:

• The Plugin Manager that handles the GUI for the plug-ins
• The Plugin Engine that handles the load, initialization, activation, etc for the plug-ins
• A third part that is the plug-in API (the methods that are allowed for a plug-in to use)

And for the screen shot lovers here are some images of what is done:




The first screen shot is obvious, it’s the Plug-in Manager GUI and the second screen shot is the features that the plug-ins are implementing. The plug-ins are copys of each other, the each add a menu to the Plug-in menu on the menu bar and by clicking that menu you can see the action on the gnome-terminal and the last two buttons on the ToolBar are also put there by the plug-ins (you can also see the output on the gnome-terminal that resulted by a click on a button). New screen shots or maybe a video next week!

For week 4 I have the intention to finish the plug-in engine, it will be a work in progress but I want to finish all the main parts, and start the geoclue-python module that I will later use with a plug-in in GTG!.

Besides this I will continue my university marathon, here in Portugal the professors seam to wait for each other and set the tasks we have to do all at the same time. I still have 3 exams and 4 assignments to submit during June.