As many may know, I’ve flittered with Mac OS X for years now, as some applications I use do not support our beloved Penguin, and I’d rather use something like *nix underpinnings and something that isn’t Windows. One app that I grew to love on OS X was sidenote. It was a really cool app designed by Laurent Baumann and made by Pierre Châtel. Basic premise of it, is you hit a hot key, or move the cursor a hotzone, and out slides a nifty little text box for notes. Unfortunately Pierre had live happen, and the last version that sidenote ran with was OS X 10.6. This left me as a sad panda, as we’re now getting ready to get 10.9. Plus, it was OS X only, so when I was on another OS (which is a good chunk of the time), I was missing out on that sweet, sweet sliding action.
Now, after a few half-assed and failed attempts, I’ve got something that is functional, and so releasing to the public. I’ve been calling it Glidenote, as ultimately the entire thing is just one giant riff on the original sidenote, and I didn’t want to reuse the name out of respect (unlike someone, who is making a commercial clone). I’ve talked a bit with Pierre, and he’s cool with me making this, and me being me, I have this puppy all nice and GPL’ed. Plus, I have designed it to be crossplatform, using the QT and libQXT libraries, so it is crossplatform.
Right now, things are a bit on the ugly side, simply because it is REALLY early on the development side, and my free time has been next to nil. I tried to get an extremely functional base together, as simply having something would help improve things for my work life. More features are planned, and more UI work will be done.
The features planned for it are:
- Adding a tool bar, instead of a menu bar (Menubar will be kept for OS X, just to comply with their guidelines, but as can be seen, isn’t part of the window for that OS)
- Make the single line text box into a search box as well. Basic plan is, you enter in a title and hit the plus button, it makes a new note, if you just type and don’t hit the plus, it acts like search. Plan is to attempt to have this as a combo box too, so you can click a drop down to pull back up previous notes without having to search.
- Simplenote sync support. I’ve already applied for API access, and waiting to hear back about it. This would allow all your notes to be up in the cloud, and automatically sync between devices. Really handy if you jump between systems a lot like I do.
Code is available from http://code.google.com/p/glidenote/. Binaries will be available here when they are made. Linux is super simple to compile with, but Mac and Windows is a bit more of a pain to get LibQXT working initially. Hopefully I’ll have something up for them soon.
Speaking of which, since it has been such a pain to geth LibQXT going for Mac and Win, I may bundle up what I had built so people have some binaries to use, since it has been a pain. For Mac, I did have to apply a patch from their bug tracker to get things going, so I’ll be making a tarball of that as well. Don’t expect me to do this all the time, but when I need to do it, I’ll pass the savings on to you. It took about a week of beating things around for Mac to get things to build right.
Below are screenshots of it running under Linux and Mac OS.
Glidenote under Linux
Glidenote Prototype (Mac OS X)
