Modernizing AbiWord code
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Modernizing AbiWord code
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Re: Modernizing AbiWord code
#2AbiWord 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.
Re: Modernizing AbiWord code
#3If you think cross platform development is bad now, go back to the late 90s or early 2000s... this brought back some painful memories. Look at the old Mozilla C++ guidelines for more cringe-worthy stuff.
Re: Modernizing AbiWord code
#4Uh, Eyeball Mark II? Where do I get my upgrade...
Re: Modernizing AbiWord code
#5I really loved AbiWord in the early 2000s.
However, the fact that they refused to default to ODF meant I switched away. Who's going to store important documents in a format that only AbiWord can read.
Still though, it's got many advantages over the LibreOffice bloat.
Re: Modernizing AbiWord code
#6If you think cross platform development is bad now, go back to the late 90s or early 2000s... this brought back some painful memories. Look at the old Mozilla C++ guidelines for more cringe-worthy stuff.
I thought Qt was a bit conservative, but then I read the wxWindows API (late 90s).
Single platform often wasn't that much better, though. The awefulness of MFC was one big reason why Delphi was so popular.
Re: Modernizing AbiWord code
#7I really loved AbiWord in the early 2000s. However, the fact that they refused to default to ODF meant I switched away. Who's going to store important documents in a format that only AbiWord can read. Still though, it's got many advantages over the LibreOffice bloat.
I lot of folks I tried to convert to abiword refused because it didn't default to .doc for saved files.
Re: Modernizing AbiWord code
#8I really loved AbiWord in the early 2000s. However, the fact that they refused to default to ODF meant I switched away. Who's going to store important documents in a format that only AbiWord can read. Still though, it's got many advantages over the LibreOffice bloat.
I loved AbiWord's file format. It was literally a basic html file, so I could confidently store anything in it and know I could read it later, much easier than any ODF.
Re: Modernizing AbiWord code
#9If you think cross platform development is bad now, go back to the late 90s or early 2000s... this brought back some painful memories. Look at the old Mozilla C++ guidelines for more cringe-worthy stuff.
Cross-platform development is bad now.
I mean yes, I totally agree that the late 90s were really bad for portable C++ development. You couldn't trust the compilers, you had limited faith in the libraries, rewriting the container classes yourself and falling back on C idioms were commonplace. Man, we really had no idea who owned which pointer back then.
But there was a sweet spot around 2006, when with C++ and Qt4 you could reach every major desktop platform with a single codebase with essentially identical UIs bar the detailed widget rendering, and you could do it using code that was still largely acceptable to work with. I did a fair bit of successful work that way.
Then the iPhone came along, and a platform explosion, incompatible managed-code platforms, many different input and output devices to support, more variety in UI design styles, the world of walled gardens and having to recreate the UI layer again and again for each company's devices. Now that's settled down a bit, and instead we have the paralysis of choice among piles of UI/back-end languages and frameworks all with their own tradeoffs.
Still, at least C++ is a nicer language now.
Re: Modernizing AbiWord code
#10If you think cross platform development is bad now, go back to the late 90s or early 2000s... this brought back some painful memories. Look at the old Mozilla C++ guidelines for more cringe-worthy stuff.
Cross-platform development is bad now. I mean yes, I totally agree that the late 90s were really bad for portable C++ development. You couldn't trust the compilers, you had limited faith in the libraries, rewriting the container classes yourself and falling back on C idioms were commonplace. Man, we really had no idea who owned which pointer back then. But there was a sweet spot around 2006, when with C++ and Qt4 you…
There are more platforms today, but the tools are much better. Maybe it's a wash.
In terms of platform sprawl I feel like we're back to the 1980s when there was Apple II, Mac, IBM PC, IBM clones (not always compatible), TRS-80, Commodore 64, etc.