[ Thanks to Christian
Schaller for this link. ]
“While the spreadsheet was the definitive killer app of the
personal computer in the early years, this position was soon taken
over by the wordprocessor. No desktop application is now as
indispensable as the word processor is to the average computer
user. Everyone from church secretaries to top level high flying
consultants of the business world rely on a wordprocessor to
perform their tasks. One of the free software projects which have
long worked to provide this essential tool to the computer users is
AbiWord. AbiWord, unlike most free software projects, is truly
multiplatform with native GUI on all its supported platforms. To
get updated on the latest events of this popular project we managed
to get Dominic Lachowicz to talk with us. Dom is one of the most
active developers of the project and maintainer of the AbiWord
GNOME front-end.”
“What platforms have working versions of AbiWord and what
platforms are still works in progress?”
“Dom: Every platform is still very much a work in progress 🙂
Some platforms are definitely more advanced than others, and (in my
opinion) the GNOME platform is the most advanced of any of our
supported platforms. Currently we fully support the GTK+, GNOME,
Win32, and QNX front-ends. We do have support for BeOS as well, but
it has fallen behind a bit, as no one is currently actively
maintaining the BeOS front-end. It is still fairly up-to-date: this
is a natural side-effect of the XP design employed by AbiWord. We
are looking for interested people to start up work on this again,
and welcome all volunteers. Hubert Figuière is working
steadily on a MacOS port, and is making some good headway on it
too. We’re really looking forward to seeing AbiWord on MacOS.”