FOSSwire

NoteFinder is a desktop note-taking application, which is designed for keeping and organising snippets of text, whether that be notes, quotes, conversations and more.

The application works around a 'notebook' concept. When you first start up the application, you get a 'default' notebook where you can immediately start collecting notes. You can later add additional notebooks as your needs increase to keep things organised.

You add a new note by clicking the plus symbol in the toolbar. NoteFinder makes use of a pretty nifty tabbed interface which allows you to have multiple notes open at once for editing.

Inside the note editing interface you can add tags to your note, as well as use wiki-style markup for formatting, including links. It's a shame a rich text editing control isn't offered, but for those familiar with working with wikis it is a nice feature.

You must remember to click the green check mark in the toolbar to save your note, however, as closing the tab accidentally will wipe out your work.

The 'Start' tab then shows you all of your notes from today, or any specified date. It is made nice and simple to scroll back through previous days with the calendar to bring up older notes for reference, and the built in search tool is pretty good, also searching through tags to retrieve notes.

One of the most interesting and unique features of NoteFinder is its support for different backends, including exporting notes out to DokuWiki on the web.

The combination of this desktop application approach with a web export means that you can quite easily use NoteFinder as a cross-platform solution and have access to your notes wherever you are.

By the looks of things, NoteFinder is still quite a young application, but I think its export and backends functionality could make it a viable alternative to web-based solutions such as Evernote in the future.

[via KDE Apps]

Keeping organised can be tough sometimes and there are lots of different applications and tools designed to help you get organised.

Tasque is designed to be a very simple todo list application, designed specifically to link in with popular online todo service Remember The Milk.

It is written in C#/Mono, so you will need all the relevant Mono gubbins already installed to get it up and running. Here on Fedora 8, there isn't a package yet, so I'll run you through how to install it from source.

First of all, head to the Tasque download page and download the archive in whichever format you want. Once you've got it, extract it somewhere, then open a terminal in that directory.

It's a fairly standard compilation process:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install # as root

Once that's done, it should show up under Office in your GNOME Applications menu. As soon as you load it up, you'll be given the option to integrate directly with Remember The Milk.

Clicking the Authorise button whisks you away to the RTM site, where you enter your username and password on the site itself and then allow API access for Tasque. Once you've done that, and clicked the button back in the app, your todo list syncs directly from the service.

By default, all your future tasks show up in the main window all together, but you can use the selection box at the top left to filter between what would appear as your different tabs in RTM.

In a similar vein, adding a task just by clicking the big button adds it directly to your RTM inbox, but again you can select which category to add it to using the arrow.

Once you've set up a task, you can then add more information such as a due date and notes. I found the due date interface to not work very well or very intuitively, requiring me to hold down the mouse on the - column to select a date from a pop-up list.

Tasque still is in its early days, and there are no official 'stable releases' yet, so this behaviour might be improved in future.

The syncing between RTM and Tasque as a desktop client works well. Any changes you make are synchronised almost instantly. My only concern on the reliance on the service is that Tasque appears to have no offline mode or cache of your tasks - i.e. at launch time you must have a connection to RTM or the application ceases to be of use.

Nevertheless, from what I've seen, Tasque is a simple approach to making Remember The Milk integrate well with the GNOME desktop, and despite some teething troubles is a must for any GNOME and RTM user.

Today we have a quick tip for productivity in your GNOME desktop. This is not a well-known technique, but it is very fast and a quick way to open any folder.

While on your desktop (either with no windows open or with the desktop focused) type / (forward slash). Now type in a folder path and hit Enter. The directory will be opened in a new Nautilus window. On top of that, it will also autocomplete most paths.

For a quick usage example, say I want to get to /var/lib quickly. Instead of having to open Nautilus and navigate to it, I just type the path out on the desktop. /var/lib Enter, and boom, I'm in the folder.