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F-Spot http://f-spot.org/Main_Page, and tomboy http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/

Read Seth Nickell's thoughts on the issue, particuliarly the section entitled "The Horror Story". It's happening.

It's bad enough that Tomboy is in GNOME and F-Spot (Novell again) is so damned nice. Users are already demanding these applications, because the alternatives suck. Developers love C# 'cause it's so nice to build with. The first few hits are free.

The whole Mono patent issue really strikes me as a Novell play for market share - they work a deal with Microsoft, write gorgeous apps in C# that everyone wants, encourage competing distros to integrate those apps, then laugh as Microsoft takes out their competition in court. Or something. IANAL, obviously. Hopefully I'm just being paranoid.

• Primer arranque (First boot): Allows graphics booting using gfxboot, something quite nice for "normal" users, as I remember my flatmate got scared at the Ubuntu screen boot, with the list of the [OK] and [FAILED] services status (background here).
  
• Instalación (Installing): Just a graphical installer with graphical partition resizing, I saw this already when installing Ubuntu and Mandriva.
  
• Más comodidad (More confortability [is that a word?]): Just the old root/user password option with automatic login.
  
• Un Escritorio más vivo (more alive desktop),Mantente a la última (stay at the edge), El nuevo Actualizar LinEx (New LinEx Update): Some desktop backgrounds, system update and package installer. Nothing too fancy IMHO.
  
• Aptéalo con APTZILLA ("Aptate it" with APTZILLA) : This is something which I believe is worth to mention, I have never seen something simillar in any other distribution. It seems to be a Firefox extension that enables to install software from an internet page. It would be very interesting to try it because from what it seems it would be a way to achieve the "click+download+click^x+install" behaviour in Windows for the end user (my father for example wont be able to install Repast framework in Ubuntu because it is not in the repositores, whereas to install it on Windows he just have to download the installer and run it).
  
• El Panel de Control de gnuLinEx: A control panel similar to what a lot of other distributions have. HOWEVER I find quite relevant that they embed the WINE emulator (which btw I.N.an E.), I imagine they try to make as easy as possible to enable Windows applications to run in Linux. That is the other property worth to note, as I have not seen any distribution that gives so much importance to it (well, besides the commecial distros like xandros, lindows [ya ya I like to call it Lindows], etc).
  
• El wiki personal (The Personal Wiki [see, spanish is not that hard]): That is the other interesting application, which a wiki like note taker (the application seems to be Tomboy.
  

on note-taking... try Tomboy. It's sticky notes combined with wiki-like crosslinking. It's not very mature app yet, but I use it a lot since I found it couple of days ago.

In my understanding (and Miguel might correct me), one of the major goals of Mono is not just to be cross-platform w/respect to Windows, but also to simply provide a very easy way to write new GUI apps for Linux. So Gtk# makes it possible to create all kinds of cool Linux apps that might never have been developed otherwise.

Check out Tomboy [1] if you use GNOME, or don't mind pulling in a million dependencies for a simple note-taking app.

[1] http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/

How about tomboy?

Maybe Tomboy http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/ would fit the bill... Its written in mono, so maybe it would be portable to windows, and it serves as a wiki-like note organizer. I'm not sure if it stores its files in html, but it looks like it could.

• VoodooPad: An excellent WYSWIG Wiki-like notebook
  
• Circus Ponies NoteBook: A visually impressive note-taking app that looks like a real lab notebook.
  
• Hog Bay Notebook: Similar to the above, but lightweight and with IMHO superior outlining facilities.
  
• PersonalWiki : A desktop interface to the web-based ZWiki.
  
• Devonthink: A note/snippet/document management system, which includes semi-supervised classification algorithms.
  

I have one note called "to-do" which links to a bunch of other notes with more details, code scraps, etc.

(It requires Mono, and it's not web-based-- if you're looking for full-blown wiki software, I have no idea.)

The promise
I remember when Chandler was first mooted. Finally an open souce project that has a vision of how to store and communicate small bits of information. Traditionally these types of applications have been lumped together with *ugly* (but accurate) acronymn, PIM.

Free the data
This is an important step in applications. Historically data is trapped or obfusticated into applications. Once you enter the data in it you can only get at it by jumping through the fire breathing coding hoops. Ocassionally its open souce (mozilla mork) but commercial applications take this to a new level - (think MS Outlook Express).

Updated Agenda?
For the younger /.'s this is not the first crack Mitch has had at this market. In '88 Mitch Kapor (father of Lotus 123, Notes) Agenda was released into the PIM market to some success. The runs are on the board. Could Chandler be the answer?

• ... A major lesson learnt from the last two years, is that we took on too much, and had too high an ambition level for the near-term. This "great leap forward" strategy didn't pan out. Instead, we have primarily switched to a "dog food" strategy to quickly develop a first release that is minimally usable, on a day-to-day basis, for us within OSAF and for our info-intensive, techno-savvy early adopters. ...

Release early and often
Well after 0.4 release I dont see anything compelling. It has trouble working on Windows, it's monolithic and appears to be *weighed* down in specifications of how to do things rather than results. Chandler looks good on paper but in clumping email, calandering, PIM and other messaging it has lost for me its original appeal. I want it usable now. Even if it is a little bit at a time. For me like its name sake (Raymond) I'm still searching for a usable application.

Alternative
So there you have it I've trashed a computer industry veteran who has runs on the board but has failed to deliver. Whats an alternative. Well one example is a Gnome app called Tomboy. Its a simple mono, GTK based note taking applet that is searchable. It allows you to click on links according to mime types and load an application. It has spell checking (along with references to various IBM patents). But the single kicker that has moved Tomboy into my sights is the integration of Tomboy with Evolution (unix version that mirrors crappy Outlook in too may ways) and Beagle The Gnome desktop is now using Tomboy as the *PIM* input and building a plugin to Evolution (email, calander), Beagle (searching). So bit by bit it's making Chandler less attractive to me.

lessons
It helps to have access to an open souce platform. Release often and early. Build an application (especially a first version) to do one thing and do it well. Get a result. Dont bloat a product with features if it is not vital and work out how can you work with other applications. Tomboy may only have a short shelf life or morph into something else in as it develops but it works right now and does the job.

I have the same problem but I'm trying to improve it..

I use Tomboy to take care of my simple notes. Addresses, meetings, etc.. I eventually copy out of there and put into Evolution.

I recently told Firefox to download everything to ~/downloads/. I make a mess out of this.

~/projects for anything coming from CVS or home-grown.

Another interesting wiki-like application is Tomboy, which is essentially a personal wiki that runs locally.