dot.KDE: The People Behind Quanta Plus

“2. How was Quanta born? How did you get involved in the
project?

“Eric:

“It was early 2000 when I saw an announcement for Quanta on
Freshmeat. I had been looking for something more advanced that the
EPM editor I was using on OS/2. I looked at Coffee Cup shareware,
Visual Slick edit and a bunch of free software. I had quickly come
to prefer KDE to GNOME and was looking for a good KDE app. The only
half decent one was Webmaker and it lacked a lot. Quanta was
version 0.97 or so when I first saw it and it was basically a
stripped KDevelop with a KHTML preview. It had no tag dialogs and
few useful features but it was cute. I wrote Dima and Alex out of
frustration that this program looked so good but didn’t satisfy my
needs as a web developer. To my surprise they asked me for input
and I specified a number of things to make it better. In fact my
focus was strictly on what would get the job done the fastest. They
had some good ideas too like programmable actions but much of the
interface and efficiency was my specification.

“Early in the development they mentioned they would not have
access to school computers soon and they lived in a youth hotel in
Kiev. I helped them to get into a house with a phone line and later
to get them a second computer. I don’t think a lot of people
realize that despite what we imagine with OSS had I not stepped up
at the time Quanta might well have died an early death…”

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