I am sorry I didn't put it in textile, been swamped here. --KenTitle: Tomboy, make your life better!
Tomboy is a simple desktop note taking tool that can truly change your life, if you let it. I have been using it for about a year now, and I has made a real impact on how I work. Tomboy is different that traditional post-it style notes, it seems to live and breath.
How is it different? It appears to be a tiny GNOME Applet, that just sits in your panel quietly. But, when used properly, you can't live without it. Tomboy creates notes in a wiki style. You can link notes to other notes, navigate through them, and search. It also recognizes wiki links, type in a word that mixes upper and lower case characters without spaces and it assumes it is a link to another note. Click on the word and a new note appears. You can also make any text into a link, if you are not comfortable with the wiki style.
How is this useful? Lets use a Todo list as an example. Create a new note with title Todo, list some tasks below them... seems simple. Make each task into a link, then click on the links. That pops up new notes for each task. Here you can describe the task, leave notes to yourself, etc.
There is a plug-in interface which allows external developers to extend the functionality. There are several plug-ins included. One plug-in that isn't included but is worth mentioning is the reminder plug-in. Very cool when using Tomboy as a todo list. Insert a line in a tomboy note that begins with a "!", a date and/or time in most any format and that is it! Very useful, however it would be nice if there was a GUI to configure the reminders. The reminder plugin isn't included in Tomboy, but available here.
Some of the included plugins:
Some of the things that are in the works:
Another feature that I would love to see is sharing notes with Avahi, allowing you to automatically share notes on your network. Maybe even push notes to other Tomboy users, anything to reduce the amount of email traffic.
In conclusion, Tomboy can be a very useful tool. You will only get out of it what you put in, so give it a real shot. Using it is a bit of a change from how most people take notes, but worth the adjustment. It is also still a rather young tool (although amazingly feature full), so we can expect additional useful features in the future.