[ Thanks to Sam
Tobin-Hochstadt for this link. ]
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2000 23:09:13 -0800
From: Paul Rohr
Things have really been hopping in the AbiWord community this
past week.
1. New release
First off, our servers have been crammed with people downloading
last week’s 0.7.8 release:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/00/February/0016.html
So far, we’re not sure whether people are more interested in the
UI improvements (true WYSIWYG support, no more character dirt,
Overline support, Insert Date and Time dialog, etc.) or all of
Henrik’s work to remove English-centric assumptions from the
keyboard and spell check code. All those people can’t be LaTeX
fans, right?
Perhaps it’s just the usual post-release surge of people who
can’t wait until new releases show up on their favorite
distribution.
2. We won! Again!
For whatever the reason, we’re sure getting popular, though. I
was at Linux World last week to give a talk on cross-platform
software development (no, the slides still aren’t online yet,
sorry), and was thrilled to receive yet another Show Favorite
award, this time in the Office Suite category:
http://www.abisource.com/pr_lwce2000ny.phtml
Considering the fact that our “suite” currently only consists of
a word processor, and it still hasn’t reached 1.0 yet, that’s a
pretty strong vote of confidence! 🙂
Thanks to everyone who recognized that we were entered under
SourceGear’s name and voted for us.
3. On the development front this week…
… things have really been hopping. I guess there must have
been a lot of pent-up demand, since there were almost 150 messages
to the developer list alone in less than a week.
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/00/February/
Current hot topics include:
– Mac folks arguing APIs (toolbox vs. PowerPlant, Carbon vs.
Classic)
– a brief discussion of Corel’s new printing framework for Unix
– how to keep the build warning-free, given how picky our gcc flags
are
The cool checkin of the week award goes to Justin, who added
support for images to the Word importer while hanging out at the
Slashdot booth at the show:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/00/February/0047.html
4. Project of the Week
Finally, there’s been a lot of activity from people who’ve been
claiming and finishing the various outstanding POWs:
http://www.abisource.com/pow.phtml
Now that the backlog is clearing out, it’s time to start
creating new POWs to challenge people. So, I’m happy to report that
the goal of this week’s project will be to find one or more
talented writers to edit some sort of AbiWord Weekly News.
Paul,
guest editor 😉