Well, it appears that I am the new editor of the AbiWord Weekly News. While we mysteriously seem not to have released any major new versions or won any awards this week, that doesn't mean that nothing has happened in the AbiWord community.
1. Development News
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Since the last edition of this newsletter, we have had 23 new patches go into the tree, and have added 2 new names to the list in CREDITS.TXT. Congratulations to Kevin and Giovanni.
The biggest new code is from Henrik Berg, who checked in lots of all-new support for fields, including a GUI interface. All of this code was added behind debugging flags, thought, so if you're hankering to check it our, debug builds will be in order. As can be seen from the traffic on the list, we are still determining the final shape of field support to come.
The other big checkin came from Kevin Vajk, who added much-needed file sniffing type detection. As someone who has written bad code to try to avoid this problem, I thank him on behalf of all Abi developers.
Other significant developments ;-) include various improvements as Thomas Fletcher to the QNX port, which seems to be progressing nicely, at least from the perspective of an outsider. We also have a new translation to Brazilian, provided by Giovanni do Reis Nunes.
Improved translations include Finnish, courtesy of Jarmo Karvonen and Italian, from Marco Innocenti. Currently, AbiWord is translated into 13 languages other than English.
Finally, Shaw added a quick fix for bug 522, and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt added CSS/HTML export to preserve display consistency.
2. On The List
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With 139 messages on abiword-dev since the last edition, the list is on pace to have more messages than ever before. Additionally, traffic on abiword-user has been picking up, indicating growing interest in our product on the part of the outside world (as if we didn't know that already :-) This week's major topics included:
1. Fields - There has been lots of discussion on this point, both as to code and file-format implementations.
2. Mac Port - This continues to be a hot topic, as developers discuss everything from resource files to build environments to toolkits.
3. Our Focus Model - As we try to squash infamous bug 522, the underlying issues with the way we (and our toolkits) handle focus bubbles upward.
3. Cross-Platform Application Development
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At LinuxWorld Expo, out very own Paul Rohr gave a talk with the above title. A set of HTML slides, along with the ABW format text, is now available on the AbiWord site.
4. Project of the Week
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TODO
5. Other News
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This week's cool patch award goes to Kevin Vajk, for his file sniffing code.
This week's cool post award goes to Keith Stribley, for his treatise on fields. Not only does he provide a mountain of information (including lots of file format implementation) but this was his first post to the list. Welcome aboard, Keith.
Sam TH