Diary editor

The main window of the Diary.I've been keeping a personal diary for a while, but recently I've found that my previous storage method for it – keeping each day's entry in a separate file, stored in a folder hierarchy – was getting too unwieldy. That's why over the last few weeks I've written a small program to manage a diary.

I initially started writing it in Vala, but I found that I was having to put in dirty hacks every couple of tens of lines just to get the simplest things working with an SQLite database. Either due to my own lack of knowledge of Vala, or teething problems for the language and its bindings, I couldn't get it to work, so about a week ago I scrapped it and ported the program to old-fashioned C.

So here it is: version 0.1 of my diary program. It supports basic editing of diary entries, a calendar view of the month and the ability to add "links" to each entry. A "link" is something which connects the diary entry to the wider world, much like a hyperlink connects one web page to another. At the moment only "URI", "file" and "note" link types are supported, but in the future I plan for one to be able to link to anything from an F-Spot album to a section of a chat log in Empathy. Such links would allow references to conversations, e-mails, photo albums (etc.) in diary entries to be easily followed to find the goodies mentioned.

I also have plans to add Evolution calendar integration, as well as potential integration with Mugshot. It would be nice to see diary entries which can show all of what happened on that day, from doctor's appointments in Evolution to the songs Mugshot says you listened to.

Keeping my feet more grounded in reality, however, I think the next thing on the agenda is encryption for the database the diary uses, so your darkest secrets aren't so easily discovered.

To get it, you can either download the tarball or get the latest bzr tree from my website using the following command:

bzr branch http://tecnocode.co.uk/diary/

Thanks to people in the comments for pointing out a better way of branching.

The only requirements are gtk+-2.0 >= 2.12, sqlite3 and gtkspell-2.0, and it's built in the usual fashion.

Feedback is welcomed warmly and given somewhere to stay for the night.

20 thoughts on “Diary editor”

  2. somi

    *** glibc detected *** ./diary: free(): invalid pointer: 0x08079a40 ***
    ======= Backtrace: =========
    /lib/libc.so.6[0xa7325a00]
    /lib/libc.so.6(cfree+0x89)[0xa73276f9]
    /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0(g_free+0x31)[0xa74303e1]
    ./diary[0x804e778]
    /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0[0xa74d8df7]

    you've got something wrong in memory allocations

    1. Philip Withnall Post author

      Could you provide a more complete stack trace please (e-mail it to contact-march-2008 {at} tecnocode.co(.)uk)? I've never encountered that crash. Thanks.

      1. wen

        I got the same problem. Did you already solve this or do you still need a backtrace?

        Cheers,
        wen

        1. Philip Withnall Post author

          I believe I've solved it, although if you want to check out bzr trunk above and see if you still get the problem, I'd be grateful.

  3. ethana2

    "Keeping my feet more grounded in reality, however, I think the next thing on the agenda is encryption for the database the diary uses, so your darkest secrets aren’t so easily discovered."

    BINGO. Let me know when it's ready to use. I'll test it for you. ethana2 {at} gmail(.)com

    ... by the way, 'darkest' makes them sound like evil or something. 'deepest' may simply be more accurate in many cases.

  4. ethana2

    Oh, and by 'ready to use'.. I guess I may mean .deb binaries..

    Whenever I mess with source code, bad things happen..

  6. ethana2

    Yeah, that'd be great!

    sudo apt-get install gnome-diary

    ...It's written in C and GTK, I don't see why they wouldn't accept it.

  8. Juerg Billeter

    The Vala bindings for SQLite are certainly not mature yet. However, I'd be interested in the problems you've had. Many issues can be fixed very quickly. Feel free to join IRC #vala on GimpNet.

  9. Boke

    Looks great!

    Something cool would be being able to "export" the entries as HTML output, so you could read your diary like a blog, and even make it public.

  10. Olivier Lê Thanh

    Look very interesting.

    Too bad it is not using a text file based format any more. I would have loved to just edit file by hand in ssh when not in front of my computer. But if that's the price to pay for a better integration with other apps then I guess I will be happy to pay it.

    Why are you giving such complicated instruction to retrieve your tree instead of a simple :
    bzr branch http://tecnocode.co.uk/diary/

    1. Philip Withnall Post author

      You could edit your diary database remotely using the `sqlite3` command-line tool if you wanted. The database schema is pretty straightforward.

      I don't know why I'm using such a complicated instruction to branch the tree. Thanks for the simpler one.

  13. sn0n

    perfect as is. (@work so cant try)
    but from the screenshot , looks perfect. i like simple apps with simple goals. dont make it a new MS Office Word Blogging tool... 😉

    1. Philip Withnall Post author

      I have seen Drivel, and even used it, but I don't think posting to blogs is quite the same as keeping a diary. Diaries are local, although I was thinking about some way to eventually export diary entries to a blog if required.
      Additionally, Drivel doesn't seem to have had a release in a few years, although there may have been no need for it to have.

  15. Mark

    Very nice piece of work you've done, thanx a lot.
    I agree to Boke's suggestion: Export to txt or html would be nice.

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