We assuming Memoranda is already installed on your Linux system (that is, ZIP archive is unpacked) into, say, “/opt/memoranda” directory. To be sure that the executables have proper permissions, run:

chmod 755 /opt/memoranda/memoranda.sh
chmod 755 /opt/memoranda/lib/kde/systray4jd

Creating a desktop shortcut

1. Right-click anywhere on your desktop, select “Create New->Link to application…” and enter “Memoranda”.
2. Go to “Application” tab and enter into the fields
   Command: /opt/memoranda/memoranda.sh
   Work path: /opt/memoranda
3. Go back to “General” tab and click the icon. In the icon dialog box select “Other icons”, “Browse” and point it to ‘/opt/memoranda/lib/icons/memoranda48×48.png’
4. Press “Ok”

To put new shortcut into KDE panel also, simply drag-n-drop it from the desktop.

Creating a menu item

1. Right click the desktop shortcut created before and select “Copy”
2. Open Konqueror and navigate to “/home/you/.kde/share/applnk” directory. Tip: if Konqueror does not display “.kde” directory, select “Show hidden files” in its “View” menu.
3. Create new subdirectory (say, “Utilites”, “Office” or “PIM”) or go into an existing one. These subdirectories are the sections of your K menu. Right click anywhere in this directory and select “Paste file”.

Done.

A good lesson for a release maintainer. “Build Once Run Everywhere” is not so simple, you see.

Major updates

The most important feature which was introduced is the competed mechanism of “hierarchical tasks”. Before, the projects had only a flat list of “todo” tasks but now it is possible to create tree-like task structures where every task can be extended and detalized by any number of subtasks:

The mechanism and data model of hierarchical tasks was implemented by Ryan Ho with assistance of Michael Bernadsky but it had no user interface for a long time. The user interface (new tasks editor) has been developed by Jyrki Velhonoja and me using a wonderful Swing hack called TreeTable – a combination of JTree and JTable JFC/Swing components.

Note that new task mechanism is backward-compatible – that is your existing (flat) to-do lists should be seamlessly integrated into new hierarchical data model. They simply will be interpreted as one-level task sets and you can extend them with subtasks as you wish.

Another innovation is the improved notes editor with customizable fonts for paragraphs, headers and monospaced text (see new “Editor” tab in “Preferences” dialog). Also there is an option to antialias the text of notes.

The sourcecode got some refactoring. I moved the code of WYSIWYG HTML editor into the main Memoranda codebase to avoid version conflicts (before it was a separate “htmleditor” CVS module and JAR-file). So, you should not check out this module anymore – it is obsoleted. I plan to start new separate project for the editor, because it can be used in many applications, not only in Memoranda.

What’s next?

The final release – I believe. During two years we added a lot of new features and fixed the most of the bugs. It is more than enough for the First Final. We also need the user’s documentation – I have a draft of it but it is seriously outdated – it reflexed some ancient beta-version and it needs to be synchronised with the current state of Memoranda.

Memoranda

I began to think about changing jNotes name as far back as I started to work at Version 2. It seemed to be basically new product, rather than just new version of jNotes. Another reason was annoying confusion with another software called JNotes – some Java stuff related with Lotus Notes. So, I posted my thoughts to the mailing list and asked people to suggest new names.

Ten variants of new name were proposed:

• InteliNotes
• Notestopia
• Memoranda
• LineUp
• Jot
• NoteSoup
• MyNotes
• NoteBurn
• Jilofax
• Chronicles (my variant)
• … oh no, “jNotes” forever! (another my variant)

As a result of voting, the “Memoranda” name invented by Iván Ribas was selected. I very liked that name and voted for it too. At the end of September 2003 we registered new project on SourceForge, moved the codebase and made new release under new name. New web-site had been launched at the same time. The old site was remained as a home of jNotes 1.0 (currently inactive).

Since then, among increasing stability, the software got a lot of new features. The most important ones are:

• Summary page (“Agenda”)
  A “today startup page” which summarize information of active tasks of all projects and upcoming events of this day.
• Hierarchical tasks
  Now the tasks of a project have hierarchical structure, so that every task may contain sub-tasks.
• Multiple notes per day
  until recently, a single calendar date was associated with a single note. Now it is possible to have few notes associated with the same date.
• 14 national localizations
  Now Memoranda speaks Catalan, Chinese, Chinese (Taiwan), Dutch (Belgium), Dutch (Netherlands), Finnish, France, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japan, Russian, Serbian and Spain. The language of GUI is selected automatically depending on user’s system locale settings.

The current status of Memoranda is 1.0 Release Candidate 2. The next release (I hope) will be final.

Memoranda 1.0-RC2 screenshot

Who did it

Many people in different time took part in Memoranda development. Above all, these are code commiters:

• Patrick Bielen (pbielen)
• Ryan Ho (rawsushi)
• Yunjie Liu (noregister)
• Iván Ribas (ivanrise)
• Carel-J Rischmuller (carel-j)
• Jeremy Whitlock (jcscoobyrs)
• Jyrki Velhonoja (velhonoja)

And those who were not the developers, though they did the great help for the project:

• Thomas Chuffart
• Willy Dobe
• David Nagy
• Kenneth J. Pouncey
• Sava Rados
• Michael Radtke
• Milena Vitali-Charewicz
• Toru Watanabe
• … and everyone I may have forgotten, sorry.

(all people listed alphabetically by their second names)

I don’t say thanks because this is our software, not my own ;-)

Memoranda 2.0 ?

My thoughts on Memoranda future are coming soon, so the saga continues…

jNotes

As far as I remember, I always worked in multitasking mode and was involved in few projects simultaneously. Once I had an idea that I needed something to help myself to manage that “concurrency” and organize my work – a kind of scratchpad or notebook to quickly make and find text notes and to-do’s. I tried out few software tools but I didn’t find what might exactly fit my needs. Some of them were heavy project-management tools with a lot of features which were useless for me, while others, on the contrary, had no features I expected. So, I decided to write that tool with my own hands.

My requirements were simple — it should be quick lightweight tool to easily keep brief daily notes and to-do lists. I thought it might be a simple text editor with a calendar interface. Instead of keeping batches of “YYYYMMDD” text files (as I did before), I should be able to select a date with a calendar widget and immediately get a text I had written then, or start an empty page if there was no text. No relations with files (no opening and saving operations) and quick navigation were the special points.

Later I decided that to-do lists were better to implement as special checklist widgets, rather than as simple text. In this case, it would be possible to count progress of the projects. So, they became an another concern, separated from text notes. Although I had no strong needs to schedule time events, I thought it would be an useful and popular feature (and later I convinced it was really so).

I wrote this tool in my spare time for one month and called it “jNotes” – “Java + Notes” (I had no long thinking about its name, you see ;-). It was released on SourceForge in July, 2002.

jNotes 1.0 screenshots

jNotes 1.0 had a plain-text editor for diary notes, to-do checklists editor and events scheduler/notificator. The notes had been grouped in the “books” and to-do items in the “projects”. All data stored transparently as XML files, but the notes editor worked with plain-text files, that is it could be used as an usual text editor. There was also an export feature to save a whole notes book as an HTML file.

It was proved to be a simple but really helpful tool, and it got some popularity with time.

jNotes 2

In the end of 2002, when jNotes became rather stable and bugs-free software, I summarized my personal experience of using it together with users’ feedback and started to think about next version. There were some new ideas and it was clear that the software required a much of redesign to those ideas could be implemented.

jNotes was not longer a tool for my personal needs only, and my needs were changed. It was obvious that the ad-hoc design of jNotes 1.0 should be reinvented on more common and consistent basis. After investigating of users activity models and imagined use cases, I invented a new concept of a project. This concept became a foundation for new user experience.

A project in new version considered as a date-oriented collection of text notes, tasks and links to resources. The concept of “books” were discarded, but the collections of notes became integrated into the projects together with tasks. The concept of the tasks were revised too — no longer one-day todo items with boolean “done or not” status, but the processes within the project’s time bounds. They got a start and end date, priority level and percentage of completion. The links to project-related resources were another innovation. Any local file or URL can be included as a “shortcut” into the project’s resources list for quick access to them with suitable external application.

The second version of jNotes was written almost from scratch for three months and the first Alpha release was appeared at May, 2003.

jNotes 2.0-alpha screenshot

An unsignificant amount of code was inherited from version 1, but almost everything had been rewritten – an object model, user interface and so on. The software got a new WYSIWYG styled text editor with HTML export/import, unlimited undo buffer, find&replace functions and many other improvements and new features.

The alpha of the Version 2 quickly became even more popular than jNotes 1. At July, 2003 I got an offer of help from another developer. Patrick Bielen got involved into the project and started to contribute very enthusiastically. Iván Ribas joined us a little later. Besides, we got a big deal of patches, bug reports, translations and other useful stuff from numerous mailing list members. So, at September, 2003 there was a little but real opensource community.

Part II >>