Tellico

Tellico has moved into KDE's extragear office module

If you use Tellico’s code from SVN, you’ll need to update your checkout. Tellico has moved into KDE’s extragear module at http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/office/tellico/. Read techbase for info on using KDE’s subversion.

Now that Tellico has moved into its new home, I hope to be able to get a beta release of Tellico 2 out in a month or so, the first version for KDE4. We’ll see how well that goes!

Another mention for Tellico

Tellico gets a brief mention on a page listing free software:

This program is a bibliography/collection manager. You can use it to manage your bibliography for school. Using this program, you can easily archive all the bibliography information for all your books so that it is all at your fingertips…even after you return a book to the library. You can also use this software to manage your reading list. I have spent a long time trying to find a free program that would manage my reading list. After a lot of online searching, I gave up and decided that such a thing did not exist. However, while researching for this article, I found Tellico. This program is perfect for managing reading lists. In fact, you can even rate your favorite books using a star system! This program also has an information packet on what Tellico is and how to use it.

Although, I have to wonder. All the rest of the software on the page are Windows-based, or cross-platform. Anyone who tries to run Tellico on Windows right now will be rather disappointed…that doesn’t really get mentioned anywhere.

Tellico trunk development is now in KDE playground

I just copied Tellico trunk into trunk/playground/office/tellico on the KDE SVN server. You can check out the sources from anonymous SVN by using:

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/office/tellico

I’ll be working on checking out the build system, the i18n generation, etc. and then full-speed ahead with Tellico 2.0!

Tellico 1.3.5 Released

Tellico 1.3.5, a.k.a. “Valentine’s Reward” dedicated to my wife (!), is available. The md5 sum is ca5d9db11fa1dd33dfe317ffe095435c if you care. This is expected to be the last release of Tellico for the KDE3 desktop, unless some unforeseen bug shows up.

Changelog:

• Updated entry updating to not combine multiple values.
• Fixed CueCat decoder to work for UPC and ISBN values.
• Updated Delicious Library 1 importer to handle movies and games.
• Fixed query bug with z39.50 ISBN searches.
• Fixed Ubuntu bug 317822, don’t mark collection modified when image is found in local data directory.
• Added date, time, and username as available params to XSLT export.
• Added patch from Jake Maciejewski to fix JavaScript sorting.
• Fixed crash when exporting to small Alexandria collections.
• Updated search dialog to open edit box for multiple ISBN search automatically.
• Added various small performance tweaks.
• Added option for using SAX loading instead of DOM loading. Still experimental, use --enable-sax.

That last bullet may be of interest to you if you have very large collections. The performance is drastically better for loading Tellico data files. The SAX loader will likely be the default for the next major release of Tellico.

This is the first time I built and ran the KDE3 version of Tellico on my shiny new KDE 4.2. desktop, so I hope I got the package built correctly. Let me know if something seems to be amiss.

Tellico Plans

Big plans for Tellico are coming up. I hope to get version 1.3.5 released this weekend, with a slew of mostly minor bug-fixes that have been made since 1.3.4 came out last September. That will probably be the last release in the 1.3 branch as well as the last release for the KDE3 platform.

I’m taking the opportunity now, with the jump to KDE4, to do something I’d considered for a while. I requested and received a KDE SVN account, and I plan to eventually move Tellico into the KDE Extragear module. There’s a whole process for moving into KDE SVN, so first Tellico will be in playground, then in kdereview, then, I hope, eventually in the office category for Extragear.

I won’t be importing all of Tellico’s history. It will just be a snapshot upload and moving on from there. The advantages that I hope for in moving onto the KDE server are:

• Increased visibility in the KDE community
• More translation help
• Maybe even some coding help
• And as someone on the mailing list reminded me, the chance to use KDE’s bugzilla.

Novell Forge has been very dependable in the last year or so after a bit of a rocky start. I really appreciate their generosity in offering project hosting. I’ve not yet decided what I’ll do with the mailing list.

I’d also like to say that I really appreciate the help of everyone who has contributed patches, bug reports, translations, artwork, donations, and even the occasional encouraging email. This is fun stuff! In particular, with the recent work to port to KDE4, Regis Boudin and Petri Damstén have been contributing a lot of code and expertise.

After 1.3.5 gets released, I’ll import a copy of Tellico’s trunk into KDE playground, and we’ll go from there. Happy collecting!

Debian Package of the Day: Tellico

Tellico was chosen as the Debian Package of the Day for January 4. The review has a lot of screenshots, and I must say, I’ve never heard of hyperplane arrangements before!

There are many special-purpose collection managers (most of which are listed on the tellico homepage), but tellico is one of the earlier general purpose managers. Some applications (such as GCstar) are becoming more general-purpose as they mature. Others (such as Stuffkeeper) are simply younger applications and are not yet stable. Tellico is a well-designed application and therefore can give even the special-purpose collection managers a run for their money.

OpenSUSE 11.1 and Tellico

Tellico gets mentioned as one of the 45 or so software titles on the whole openSUSE 11.1 feature list. Maybe they have some sort of user tracking that tells them Tellico is popular?

The feature list seems to come from a wiki feature list for 11.1 so maybe someone just added Tellico there. In any case, that makes me pretty excited!

I downloaded openSUSE 11.1 but haven’t installed it yet. With the end of year Christmas activities, upcoming nuptials, and family travel, I have far more important things to focus on. :P

Linux Needledrops reviews Tellico

I just came across a (somewhat old) review of Tellico that focuses on importing and working with music collections.

Then I discovered Tellico. It was designed for the KDE desktop environment, but so far I have not encountered any problems while using it in Gnome (Linux Mint 5.0, Elyssa). I was finally able to import my windows based data into a new program with relative ease. All I had to do was export the Windows data as a text file and then import it into Tellico. To be fair, there are quite a few other Linux programs that offer the ability to import text files, but their interfaces were not nearly as easy to use or as straightforward.

It’s a very step-by-step review of importing a file into Tellico.

Bauble - neat botanical tool

From reading a review of Tellico (in German), I came across a link to Bauble, a botanical specimen database. That’s pretty cool.

Update on Tellico for KDE4

Evidently, there’s a lot of website searches for Tellico and KDE4. Well, not a lot, but a decent number really. So here’s a quick update. Everything compiles and runs. Visually, there’s nothing out of place, as far as I can see. There is something wrong with the image loader, so don’t overwrite your files with the trunk version just yet.

I’ve been wonderfully busy with wedding preparations lately, so my priorities don’t include Tellico right now. Occasionally, I have a chance to sit down and do a little coding. I have not tried all the functionality in the KDE4 port just yet, so I’m not sure what’s actually broken. In the screenshot above, there are some theme issues, I think, which is why some of the buttons are squished and the menu bar color looks a little off.

Previous versions of Tellico also have pretty high memory usage, especially for large files. I believe the issue is just that the Qt DOM classes for loading XML take up multiples of memory. I’ve been experimenting with using the SAX loader instead, which may makes things more efficient.

That’s a pretty big change to an integral part of the application, so it won’t be on by default if I have another release in the 1.3.x series. But maybe it’s something to explore more in a new release. Also, from my quick estimates, running with KDE4 decreases the total memory used by Tellico by about 25-30%. That’s pretty nice.

Tellico: Export to UIEE

There was a recent request on the Tellico mailing list about exporting to the UIEE format. Based on the information at uiee.com, I put together a stylesheet for exporting Tellico XML format to UIEE.

It’s rudimentary, since I’m not really familiar with the UIEE usage patterns. But it should be readily apparent how to improve and update it to include the information needed. Let me know if you have any questions.

Zotero Makers Sued

Thomson Reuters is suing George Masons University, sponsors of the Zotero bibliographic software. The Disruptive Library technology blog has details and extracts from the suit.

I’d note that it doesn’t look like the Thomson legal team actually had anyone look at the Zotero code. The complaint alleges that “users of Zotero [are freely converting] the EndNote Software’s proprietary .ens style files into open source Zotero .csl style files and further distributing such converted files to others.”

It’s hard to figure out what Thomson Reuters thinks they’re gaining with the lawsuit, aside from the eternal ire of technically-savvy people all over the world.

According to a story from Courthouse News Service, Reuters is claiming that George Mason is violating the terms of its license agreement by including a function in Zotero that will convert citation styles from the proprietary EndNote format to a format that can be used by Zotero. Reuters also asking for $10 million in damages for destroying the EndNote customer base. Since George Mason is a state institution, the Commonwealth of Virginia is also named in the suit.

Ugly Qt

Heh, to each his own. I’ve always held that the Java widgets are some of the ugliest I’ve seen since Motif, but Claudio compares them favorably against Qt.

…tellico is QT and thus ugly as hell (not as important, but not pleasant to work with).

By contrast, JabRef has a very clean interface and the search is fine for my needs (regular expressions). You can even change the look and make it look it like a GTk+ application.

I didn’t know about the Gtk+ theme. I’ll have to figure out if I have that available somewhere on my system.

Tellico 1.3.4 Released

I have another minor release of Tellico, 1.3.4, available.The changes include:

• Updated IMDb import.
• Improved drag/drop to match on file extension.
• Added (minimal) searching for board games from Amazon.
• Fixed bug with linked images in HTML reports.
• Fixed CSV import error for consecutive white-space.

More on board games in Tellico

Raphaël Pinson recently blogged about using Tellico for his collection of board games. He’d emailed me to ask about searching Amazon, so I expanding the Tellico search to include Toys. That’ll be in the next version release, 1.3.4 I guess.

The catch is that Amazon just lumps a lot of the information as BrowseNodes, including the number of players, game genre, age group, and others. And, as my fiancee would say, the vocabulary is not controlled at all. The format is free-form, for the most part. I can’t really blame Amazon for that, but it does make it impossible to sort through meaningfully.

And unfortunately, Tellico and GCstar don’t import and export board game collections from each other yet, so I my suggestion to Raphaël to use the GCstar plugin didn’t work.

I’ll have to take a shot at getting that import working in Tellico, at least. My list of things to work on grows!