AbiWord is too buggy for Bonita

Friends,

Please understand that in what follows I am genuinely trying to help,
not to insult or offend you. I'd like to see AbiWord succeed. I'd like
to see you crush Microsoft Word like a bug.

A few weeks ago I convinced my wife Bonita to use AbiWord to transcribe
her lecture notes for school. She needed to do only very basic word
processing, creating documents just a few pages long, with some JPEGs
pasted in because her notes were for art history.

She found AbiWord, running on Windows XP, to be so buggy as to be
completely unusable. Eventually she gave up, and is presently using
OpenOffice. I've found other reasons to be unhappy with OpenOffice - it
doesn't do safe saves - so for now I've reverted back to Word.

Her main problems were screen refresh problems. AbiWord spent so much
time redrawing the screen that she had trouble even entering her text.
There were also lots of bugs in the screen drawing. For example, she
was able to repeatedly reproduce a bug in which clicking the mouse would
cause a screen shot of the lower right portion of the screen to appear
in AbiWord's window, only to disappear when she released the mouse.

That is, she'd see her clock, and the icons that are at the opposite end
of the bar where the start menu is, some of her desktop, and a piece of
abiword's window frame and window contents stuck in the middle of her
abiword document window.

On another occasion, she had written less than a page of text, when she
selected a single paragraph. AbiWord then "exploded" her text into
eight pages. She showed me that the insertion caret on one page had
become three inches tall.

I respectfully request that you focus your efforts on fixing bugs rather
than adding any new features, at least until AbiWord for Windows is
stabilized.

It's quite possible that AbiWord works better on Linux, but there are
many more potential users on Windows. I know it is controversial to
write free software for non-free operating systems, but I assert you
made the right choice to support Windows. Few people are going to
install Linux just to try it out, but lots of them would install a five
megabyte download just to see if a free word processor is worth their
while. My first experience with free software was on a very non-free
SunOS box.

You have to understand, every software developer must understand,
whether they write free, open source or proprietary software - if a
user's first experience with their product is bad enough, they won't be
willing to give it a second try, even if you do fix all the bugs.

I haven't looked in your bug database yet, but I expect that if you
fixed all the UI bugs that have already been reported, Bonita would find
AbiWord worth using. I could then probably convince her to give it a
second try.

If you think we've discovered new, or as yet unreported bugs, then I
would be happy to to reproduce every bug I can find and file proper bug
reports.

I've been subscribed to abiword-dev since long before 1.0, as it has
always been my intention to help out with its development. I am sorry I
have not been able to up until now. But I'm learning to manage my time
better these days, maybe soon I can be of more substantial help. I am
particularly good at debugging, and I run Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
machines all on the desk in my office.

(I read Alan Lakein's book "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your
Life", and as a result I am both able to get my work done more
effectively, and to have more time for other things that are important
to me. I recommend it highly.)

Ever Faithful,

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com

    Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
Received on Thu Mar 17 17:36:23 2005