Tomboy in 2.16

[Alex Graveley <alex beatniksoftware com>]

Hi,

Tomboy is a desktop note-taking application for Gnome and is bundled by 
many major distributions.  I think it counts as a popular and worthwhile 
software.  Should we bite the bullet and add it to the Gnome desktop 
officially?

Providing a reliable, friendly UI for note-taking is valuable to our 
users, and could provide an important differentiator between Gnome and 
other desktops.  Including this functionality in the platform also 
ensures that it can be used as a strong base for integration with other 
applications.

Tomboy is already a well-behaved Gnome application, but several tasks 
would need to be completed before inclusion:
 * Using jimmac's trademark-free icons by default.
 * Allowing themed icons.
 * Basic user documentation.

These are all relatively straightforward, though there are certainly 
others that I'm missing.

An important question may be the possible deprecation of the stickynotes 
applet in favor of Tomboy, in which case an upgrade path will need to be 
supported.  Personally, I think both applications have value on the 
desktop, though I concede the conflict in functionality may lead to 
confusion.

For the record, Tomboy is entirely original code which happens to be 
written in C#.  This would make it the first Gnome application to 
require the Mono platform.  Luckily, Mono is now included by many major 
distributions already.

Given that Tomboy is the probably the smallest and therefore the most 
digestible of the new crop of Mono-based Gnome applications, I think the 
time is right to discuss inclusion.

Thanks,
-Alex

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