Toba For the Mac!

Being written in Java, Toba is already platform independent. But there was a glitch on the mac where it was not recognizing right clicks. That's fixed. I've also created a Mac OS X "installer" so that you just have to unzip the zip download and double click on the icon to run the application. Just easier to use. The download is on the SourceForge download site.

Toba is Released!

Toba has been released. Version 0_8_0 was released on 2/7 (or 2/8 depending on your time zone). Check out Toba's main homepage or go straight to the download site.

Toba's History

A screenshot of the graphics interface to Toba

I'd like to talk about how Toba got started. Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I wrote a program for taking class notes and keeping bibliography references.

I didn't really like using a word processor for taking notes. Either you ended up with one big file for the whole class or you ended up with multiple, disjoint which couldn't be searched (no desktop search tools back then). I couldn't afford the nice bibliography tools that were available at the time and figured that they were a bit of overkill anyway.

So the problem was storing, listing, and searching through bits of information that needed to be stored. I wrote the application in such a way that there was a single application framework and the editors for the bits of information were supplied through dynamically loaded DLLs. A couple of people who looked at it liked it and suggested other things that I could add to it - new bits of information.

Speed ahead a couple of years . I found myself at work with the same situation. I needed to keep track of a lot of bits of information - contacts, notes and to-do items - along with a suite of really specialized pieces of information - project opportunities, issues to be tracked.

I knew the types of information I'm going to need to track are going to evolve and change over time so the idea of a single, open application with an extensible framework would really do the trick. And now with open source products like Lucene and HSQL available, you can really pack a lot of power in an application framework without a huge amount of work.

I decided to add a couple of extra things - a command line interface for those of us who like that flexibility, saved searches so you can have lists of things that automatically update according to specified criteria and an internal scripting language so you can use the application itself as a development environment.

I got started writing it. The command line version of the application was usable within a couple of months. Eventually the graphical interface became usable. What started as a personal project to get a glorified, extensible, personal note application turned into a full fledged application.

So now I'm in the process of releasing it as open source. You can find the web site at http://www.smalldataproblem.org. I'm hoping that you'll find it useful as well and contribute new modules so the application can grow in new ways.