ANNOUNCE - Spatial AbiWord

Announcing Spatial AbiWord

Spatial AbiWord (tm) is a sister project (not to say a fork) of the
successful AbiWord (tm) Word Processor. While AbiWord's slogan is
"Word Processing for Everyone", Spatial AbiWord's slogan will be "Easy
Word Processing for Everyone on GNOME". Spatial AbiWord will target
Gtk/GNOME only.

While AbiWord itself is a very successful project its cross platform
nature of AbiWord sometimes limits the possibilities of desktop
integration, a port targeting Gtk/GNOME only does not have to make
such compromises.

Spatial AbiWord is based on the current CVS HEAD source code of
AbiWord and includes includes the following extra features:
+ Removal of all bloat, including all the functionality that should be
handeled by the desktop environment or file manager.
+ No file selectors at all for a spatial user interface, therefore no
"Open", "Save As" or similar menus and toolbar items.
        + Create new documents by right-clicking in nautilus.
        + Insert images by dragging them into the document.
        + Rename documents using the file manager instead of "Save As".
        + No multi document interface.
+ The "File" menu will be further renamed to "Document" and all
references to other documents like "Recent Documents" will be removed.
+ No standard toolbar, only the most important formatting tools.
+ Standards complicance through OpenDocument/SXW as default file format.
+ Removed "Help" menu, to make Spatial AbiWord feel really integrated
with the desktop, rather than a standalone application.

The Spatial AbiWord project will do its best to talk to usability
experts, GNOME centric linux distributions, developers and users to
gain momentum and be able to offer a streamlined experience. We are
actively seeking collaboration with people like Eugenia Loli-Queru,
Havoc Pennington and others in order to create a next generation word
processing experience. Maybe we can even get itput about performance
issues from Eugenia Loli-Queru's husband, who is an operating system
engineer.

In order to demonstrate the unity between AbiWord and Spatial AbiWord
the Spatial AbiWord discussions will take place on AbiWord's mailing
lists. The Spatial AbiWord project would like to thank Dom Lachowicz,
AbiWord's head maintainer for the permission to do so. Furthermore the
possibility of receiving user feedback from blogs will be evaluated
because users often don't like to file their issues in bugzilla and
therefore provide valuable information in blog comments [1].

The Spatial AbiWord source code is already available from AbiWord's
CVS server. Interested people are invited to check out the
JMM-DOUBLEGRAPHICS branch. Tarball snapshots will be released early
next week. The Spatial AbiWord project will also provide Gentoo
ebuilds in the future, as this is the best linux distribution out
there and everybody should be using it.

[1] http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/?2005/01/13/53-abiword-vs-iwork-part-1#c113

On behalf of the Spatial AbiWord Project,
- Robert Staudinger
Received on Fri Apr 1 10:49:48 2005