Subject: Re: more vs. better (was Re: morning hack...)
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Apr 13 2001 - 07:18:42 CDT
On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>
> 1) Macros
> 2) Embedding/Embeddable
>
I would heartily agree with Dom here.
1) Macros is something we've almost got for free. Being able to run Abi
via external Perl scripts is incredibally useful and the code for doing
this is well advanced. It's useful for a number of reasons.
a. Mail merge, Envolope printing, form letters.
b. Although we've been talking about "Church Secretaries" as our primary
market, in reality one market that Abi plays very well to are Unix Sys
Admins. These people would wet their pants at being offered Perl to script
Abi. Sys admins are powerful people in IT organizations.
Now that we have the basic code running finishing this is mostly a matter
of going through all our fv_View methods and mapping bindings to keywords.
2) Embedding/Embedables. I think this will be very important for
Abi. There is a lot of interest from the Gnome folks in Abi and as we've
already seen from Paolo, there is a sh*tload of talent amongst the Gnome
developers. Making Abi embeddable and allowing Abi to embed other apps
will naturally drag in many Gnome hackers. In addition I REALLY want to
make Abi my default email viewer/composer so I can easily handle all the
MS doc's people send me every day. Gnome needs Abi and Abi needs Gnome we
should try to get Bonobo going as soon as possible.
> But our list goes further. Martin posted a TODO list that we came up with at
> GUADEC. I want this list to be fluid, at least for the next week or two. We
> can all evaluate what needs to be done, and what we'd like to see in the
> release. I'd dislike to release a feature-disadvantaged 1.0 just about as
> much as I'd dislike releasing a bug-ridden (or 1/2 implemented features)
> 1.0.
>
This is an interesting point. A lot of people believe that Abi is a broken
Word Processor because it doesn't do Tables. Eric Sink told me he won't
use it until it does. I think we know how to Layout Tables in a robust and
reliable way by using the GTK table widget layout as an example. I'm not
yet sure how to express a table in the PieceTable or in our file format
though. I concede it will be a lot of work to implement these but we
should debate whether Abi is a broken WP without this feature.
Anyway, I'll get back to finishing styles. As usual it is more work than I
thought it would be.
Cheers!
Martin
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