Changing the world, one task at a time

The main concept behind Getting Things GNOME is that everything, absolutely everything is a task. Writing a book is a task. Developing an operating system is a task. Climbing mount Everest is task. Taking out the trash is a task. Everything.

A post-it wall

I agree. It’s terribly not romantic. But true. Like saying that every poem is just a bunch of ink on a paper. Not romantic but efficient. Better: building a system to handle every task could be a game changer, a disruptive innovation affecting the society.

It might be long but stay with me: I will describe a generic task, a generic task manager and how it will change the world.

Liblarch, a python library to handle trees and acyclic graphs

Lesson number one Some of you may be aware that Getting Things GNOME! 0.3 was released. What you may not know is that GTG is now using a python library called liblarch and that liblarch 2.1.0 was released today.

Liblarch is a python library specifically designed to handle complex trees (including directed acyclic graphs) and to display them. A liblarch-gtk component allows you to display different views of your tree in a GTK TreeView widget without any effort.

During the development of GTG, we faced major problems to handle our tree of tasks and our tree of tags. The features we wanted proved to be very complex to implement and very fragile : solving a bug would create two others. And the performance work was a nightmare.

We decided to abstract the whole concept of tree and to make it a standalone, well tested and optimized library. We are very proud of it and we are looking for more applications that would benefit from using liblarch.

Getting Thing GNOME is alive (and released)!

TLDR: GTG 0.2.9 has been released, spread the word!.

For those who don’t know Getting Things GNOME yet, it is a todo manager. In fact, it is, to my knowledge, the only todo manager that :

  1. has a clean and simple UI (see my French explanation to use GTG)
  2. allows you to have infinite level of subtasks
  3. to have the same task being the subtask of multiple parents
  4. to easily classify your tasks with colours and tags
  5. allows you to see only the task that can be done right now with the concept of workview
  6. allows you to quickly enter a lot of tasks in a few keystrokes
  7. has a DBus interface

gtg029.png

As a result, gtg was in the Techradar’s top 50 best Linux application of 2011 despite the lack of regular releases. It is probably packaged as « gtg » in your distribution so it is probably better that you try by yourself.

FlattrStat, a small statistic tool for Flattr

I’m a big fan of Flattr. But I find it hard to have some statistics about your things that have been flattered. On my Flattr account, I receive flatts for both my blog and for Getting Things GNOME!. But I want to keep a clear separation. There are multiple persons now involved in GTG and […]

Crosscompiling LibreOffice for Windows on Linux

LibreOffice heads to become one of the most prominent Free Software in the desktop ecosystem. Despite an increasing trends towards alternatives, most of desktop users out there are using a Windows operating system. The implication is straightforward: most of LibreOffice users and potential users are running Windows.

On the other hand, most of LibreOffice developers are currently under Linux. Which means that early testing, nightly builds and debugging mostly happens on Linux.

This is a known problem in free cross-platforms software. Tristan Nitot, head of Mozilla Europe, explained several times that he was using Windows not as a choice but to experience what most of Firefox users are experiencing.

What happened during GSoC 2011?

I know I’m very late, but I really wanted to talk about this year Google Summer of Code.

For the third year in a row, I was a mentor. And this year I have a huge deception to share. I’m really sad. This week, I’v received the GSoC 2011 t-shirt. They sent me the wrong size. XXXL. I can use it as a sleeping bag with my girlfriend. I’m really disappointed.

GSOC 2011

Hopefully, GSoC is not only about receiving a t-shirt. It is also about mentoring a student.

One year of LibreOffice

Not so long ago, OpenOffice.org was the less attractive project of the Linux ecosystem. You would need it, you would use it daily but you would not think it was possible to contribute to that project or to improve it in any way.

It was a necessary pile of spaghetti code from the eighties that only Michael Meeks was able to understand. He was even spending every FOSDEM trying to convince you that compiling OpenOffice was not so bad, that it took only a couple of weeks and a few terabytes of hard disk.

Then, in only one year, multiple things happened:

  1. OpenOffice.org was forked into LibreOffice
  2. Lanedo, my employer, started to offer services around LibreOffice.
  3. The first LibreOffice Conference took place in Paris.

LO conference in Paris

Getting GTG 0.2 released – Done !

Short version : GTG! 0.2 is out

Last year, I met several times with my friend Bertrand to discuss how we imagine a good GTD tasks manager. On October 17 2008, Bertrand told me that he had a funny idea for a name and I immediately created the project and commited my first try with a GTK TextView widget.

2 months later (exactly one year ago), what we had was a kind of buggy monstrous experiment.

Monster

Gpager 0.3 « Scenes From a Memory – Finally Free »

Gpager is a GPLv2 libwnck pager that just float on your desktop, allowing you to do anything you were doing with you panel pager but bigger and stronger.

Back in 2005-2006, my good friend Patrick Rácz developed a small pager for the GNOME desktop. Since then, I’ve been an happy user of this little application, recompiling it with every Ubuntu release. In fact, I just cannot live without it anymore.

We thought that it might be helpful to other and, for years, we said : « we should publish it ». Today, after fixing some small bugs, I’m proud to announce the release of Gpager 0.3 « Scenes From a Memory – Finally Free ». I created a Launchpad project and even an Ohloh page.

GPager 0.3 with human theme