graphing tomboy notes
A while ago, I blogged about wanting a mindmap-like graph interface for Tomboy showing me all my notes and the links between them. Stefano “Zack” Zacchiroli has just written a script that processes Tomboy and generates a Graphviz graph that is then rendered and shown on the fly. Sweet.
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November 9th, 2006 at 7:34 am
Ok. I think I get it. You want to keep little notes that have links to cool stuff on the internet or to others of your little notes on your comfy gnome desktop where you can get at em *fast*. Right? So I went to the Gallery (http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery.php) to get a feel for what this would be like. *Stunning!*, *breath-taking!*(You know how I love every kind of concept/mind map) But what I don’t get is this. How does this deal with that whole neatness thing? So, say I switch from my present cluttered (wince) windows desktop to your nifty gnome/linus one. And then I use these cool mindmap notes. So, instead of being covered with scrappy little texty notes, it’ll be covered with a stunning array of mind maps like in the gallery, with a few index mindmaps of groups of mindmaps. Pretty, yes, but cluttered still. How does this reconcle neatness with the need to see it all??? You guys think you’re so smart? How about tackling *that” old chestnut?? I think you’ll find that the root problem lies with the human mind (well, some of them). Now I’d like to see you guys tackle THAT!
November 9th, 2006 at 7:39 am
(How do you guys fix stuff around here?) I think you’ll find I actually meant *linux* not *Linus*. I do know the difference.
November 9th, 2006 at 10:08 am
Just saw this entry by accident.
Great to see my little script polished on more popular sites :-)
Its a nice toy, but useful? I have 127 very unstructured notes and the map is complete trash :-)
Thanks for the kudos, SM
November 9th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
Yeah, like Sebastian says, not actually useful. I’d kill for something actually integrated/useful.
November 9th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Sure, it’s not really useful as a UI, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction — I’m glad people are starting to think about these kinds of things.
November 9th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
very interesting indeed, perhaps this could me adapted to generating floor plans. ie you have an office and people have static ip’s and phone extensions, so in oo.calc you can have the lists of people with their info and maybe a column of identifiers, then when you run the script it will map those names onto some the designated location for that person’s id.
not exactly related to tomboy but this gives me the idea.
November 9th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
also, any tips on how to get that file to generate the svg with a white background?
November 9th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Does anyone happen to know of such a tool for zim (instead of tomboy)? Zim is written in perl, so no mono framework is pulled in.
November 9th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Be wary of the graphviz license (CPL). i.e. anyone extending the hack to link with graphviz should be careful.
November 10th, 2006 at 7:18 am
Wow, It is wonderful to see “Graphs” of my Tomboy Notes..
November 11th, 2006 at 3:45 am
I did a simple tomboy plugin that exports the current note and it’s children (and links from both) to a svg graph using a modified version of Sebastian’s xlst. It works just like the “Export To Html”. Needs graphviz installed, of course.
Link
November 11th, 2006 at 3:46 am
Here’s the link. (It looks like my first comment “ate” the link…)
http://lauro.wordpress.com/2006/11/11/tomboy-exporttograph-plugin/
May 28th, 2009 at 9:53 am
Great post…Thanks for sharing..