AbiWord Weekly News (2/9/2000)

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/developers/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 Rohr,
guest editor ;-)