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Modernizing AbiWord code

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Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#51

Post by frik »

takno wrote: post #48
frik wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StarOffice 5.1 run fine on a Pentium 133MHz on Win95. It come from a German company which got bought buy Novell and rebranded and open sourced as OpenOffice 1x. Comparing StarOffice 5.1 and LibreOffice 4, lottle has changed. Well, the same can be said between Office 97 and Office 2016. The office suits were already feature complete in the late nineties, and conceptional issues still plague us 20 year later, as those…

Star office 5.1 could run on pretty limited hardware, but honestly it's a stretch to describe it as feature complete. That was the bad old days when I had to boot into windows to get most non coding work done.

Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice

Read the section "Components" incl "Older discontinued components" and "Proprietary components"!

StarOffice up to v5.2 was amazingly feature full and feature complete. Newer StarOffice and OpenOffice/LibreOffice forks lost some functionality and contain incremental improvements.

StarOffice 5.1 come even with its own Windows shell for Win95, that showed the Windows desktop icons, etc. (similar to what IE4 did with Win95, it came with a free shell upgrade, then it looked like Win98)

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#52

Post by moron4hire »

This is something I think about a lot. No matter how much time we spend on software design and doing things "right", in 5 years it's all going to get thrown out by someone who thinks the codebase needs "modernizing".

It's actually a bit reassuring to me. Things only having a 5 year lifespan means you shouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about them. Code is meant to be disposable, and the less we treat it so, the more we hold ourselves back.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#53

Post by sandyarmstrong »

sjwright wrote: post #37
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #2

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

"Claris Word" isn't a product. Perhaps you were thinking of MacWrite / MacWrite Pro ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite ) or ClarisWorks ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks )?

I thought ClarisWorks was the suite, and Claris Word was the name for the word processing component? I could be misremembering, of course. I haven't used it in 20 years or so.

But yes, I'm aware of the history of the product.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#54

Post by kazinator »

moron4hire wrote: post #52

This is something I think about a lot. No matter how much time we spend on software design and doing things "right", in 5 years it's all going to get thrown out by someone who thinks the codebase needs "modernizing". It's actually a bit reassuring to me. Things only having a 5 year lifespan means you shouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about them. Code is meant to be disposable, and the less we treat it so, the mo…

If we treat software as permanent, we hold ourselves back from making risky changes that wreck it.

If we treat software as temporary, we hold ourselves back from worthwhile improvements that will have enduring value, especially if they are fairly difficult.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#55

Post by mikestew »

moron4hire wrote: post #52

This is something I think about a lot. No matter how much time we spend on software design and doing things "right", in 5 years it's all going to get thrown out by someone who thinks the codebase needs "modernizing". It's actually a bit reassuring to me. Things only having a 5 year lifespan means you shouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about them. Code is meant to be disposable, and the less we treat it so, the mo…

Things only having a 5 year lifespan means you shouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about them.

That's what we said in the 80s when we were using two-digit date fields.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#56

Post by hub_ »

apricot wrote: post #40
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #2

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

AbiWord reminds me of WriteNow, which was my favorite word processor on 68000 Macs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow

128KB binary. All written in assembly.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#57

Post by hub_ »

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #53
sjwright wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Claris Word" isn't a product. Perhaps you were thinking of MacWrite / MacWrite Pro ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite ) or ClarisWorks ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks )?

I thought ClarisWorks was the suite, and Claris Word was the name for the word processing component? I could be misremembering, of course. I haven't used it in 20 years or so. But yes, I'm aware of the history of the product.

Nope.

ClarisWord never existed — ClarisWorks was the product. Claris had MacWrite II for a time because they were the software spin-off from Apple, and that was their stand alone word processor offering, not much better than Claris Works, which was one application unlike MS-Office.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#58

Post by hub_ »

moron4hire wrote: post #52

This is something I think about a lot. No matter how much time we spend on software design and doing things "right", in 5 years it's all going to get thrown out by someone who thinks the codebase needs "modernizing". It's actually a bit reassuring to me. Things only having a 5 year lifespan means you shouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about them. Code is meant to be disposable, and the less we treat it so, the mo…

My approach is not to throw away. The changes are incremental and definitely the spirit of the original code is here.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#59

Post by takno »

frik wrote: post #51
takno wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star office 5.1 could run on pretty limited hardware, but honestly it's a stretch to describe it as feature complete. That was the bad old days when I had to boot into windows to get most non coding work done.

Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice Read the section "Components" incl "Older discontinued components" and "Proprietary components"! StarOffice up to v5.2 was amazingly feature full and feature complete. Newer StarOffice and OpenOffice/LibreOffice forks lost some functionality and contain incremental improvements. StarOffice 5.1 come even with its own Windows shell for Win95, that showed the Windo…

That's kind of the point though. They threw in lawnmower and a kitchen sink, but the word-processor and spreadsheet were lacking basic features

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#60

Post by drivingmenuts »

ciconia wrote: post #41
derefr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used AbiWord years ago, and do recall it being pretty lean. I get sort of the same feeling , these days, from Apple's Pages, though I'm not sure whether that's true. (Looking at the copy of it I have sitting around, the application bundle is 418MB, with 344MB of that being taken up by the Resources (icons, UI elements, translation strings) and SharedSupport (themes, templates) folders, leaving the app itself sittin…

Apple Pages is a toy. It's missing some pretty basic features like even/odd page margins, and becomes annoyingly slow once you do stuff like tables inside multiple columns. I recently prepared a pretty complex but not very long document using it and the experience was pretty unpleasant.

I wish they'd open source Pages, Numbers and Keynote. They really are decent programs that deserve better than Apple abandoning them.

Of course, Word 5 is still the gold standard, as far as I'm concerned. :)

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