Thanks for asking.
It is very difficult to predict the release date of any Open Source software
product, because few of the people from around the world working on it are
paid to do so on a full-time basis.
There are a number of ways to help get the program finished faster, all of
which involve help from *you* and all the other AbiWord fans out there.
1. If you are a programmer or know anyone who is, having more people to
share the work makes the process go faster. We try very hard to make sure
that anyone who'd like to help has a meaningful chunk of work they can do.
2. If you're not a programmer, but have other skills which could help out
this software product (for example, translations or evangelism), that's
great too.
3. If you or someone you know is independently wealthy and would like to
help finance additional programmers to work on AbiSuite, please contact me
privately.
4. A far more modest way to support the effort would be to buy a t-shirt or
CD from the AbiSource store:
http://www.abisource.com/buy.phtml
5. Also, any time AbiWord doesn't Just Work the way you expect it, you
should definitely make sure we've heard about it. If we don't know about a
problem you're seeing, we can't fix it. (We are very aware of the
unimplemented dialogs, though.)
6. Finally, no matter what, keep sending encouraging notes to the
developers. We love to know how and why the work we're doing really matters
to people like you. Sometimes it's hard to decide to stay up late for
another night to do more work if you don't think anyone will notice or care
that you didn't.
Paul