PROJECTS ON THE MOVE

Linus Torvalds recently sparked a flame war with his comments on the merits of a certain desktop environment [1]. Although this is just the opinion of one admittedly well-known user, it does put a whole new perspective on the recent overtures of friendship between the KDE and Gnome camps. This month we'll look at two young but ambitious Gnome projects. Tomboy The first of these programs is by Gnome developer Alex Graveley, who recently became a member of the OSDL [2] team dedicated to improving cooperation between Gnome and KDE. The application, titled Tomboy [3], provides a solution for a familiar problem: note management. Of course there are hundreds of programs that aim to help users tackle the chore of organizing notes on their desktops, but Tomboy adopts a new approach. Each “note” is a Wiki-style page. To create a new note, a user just types a heading and enters the body text in a simple text box. The tool supports simple formating with bold, italic, or strike-through typefaces.