Re: AbiWord is too buggy for Bonita

Hi Michael,

Your constructive criticism is appreciated.

Unfortunately, we presently lack the manpower (but not
the desire) to clean up our Windows port. We all
realize that this doesn't put our best foot forward,
so to speak, but there's not much we can do about it.
All I can assure you is that the Unix and MacOS ports
suck less and if someone were to help out with Windows
FE bugs, it would suck less too. Absent that, caveat
emptor.

We're not marketing AbiWord as a MSWord killer. If you
find AbiWord useful and would like to use it, great.
If you'd like to lend us a helping hand ($deity knows
we always need one), even better. In the mean time,
we're going to keep on doing our thing because we
enjoy doing it. Ascribing ambitions to us won't get
you anywhere.

Best,
Dom

--- "Michael D. Crawford" <crawford@goingware.com>
wrote:
>
> 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.
>

                
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Received on Thu Mar 17 20:44:37 2005