31–40 of 62 posts
Happy to see AbiWord, the first open-source project I was part of, continuing to do things the right way. The cross-platform approach in AbiWord has always been committed to quality over convenience, and I'm glad that's continuing.
If 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…
On Android, it involve doing JNI + Java and cross compiling the AbiWord engine. Something like what Firefox for Android is doing.
But neither is in the pipe.
I 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.
Very nice to see activity on Abiword. The enthusiasm of the author is evident. Abiword does have support for ODF, but it could be better. Abiword 3 uses ODF 1.1. At the last ODF plugfest quite some issues were found [1, end of page]. There are now automatic tests than can be run to improve ODF support. The tests can be run from the command-line and give output as HTML [2]. Currently, there is a project underway that…
There is a long list of bugs from every side.
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.
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…
Far as AbiWord, I last put it on my Mom's old laptop because it ran way faster than other Windows 8 stuff she had. She absolutely loved it because it had just what she needed, loaded instantly, and was lightening fast in general.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both part of "Gnome Office" along with a few other applications as native GTK+ office applications. Though I guess it's probably be more of a collection than a well connected suite like MS Office, LibreOffice or even whatever KOffice is called these days.
The GNOME project decided not to be serious with GNOME Office years and years ago. Imagine if they had put their effort into it though? Almost certainly they would have been at the forefront of desktop options and a good likelihood as a candidate for corporations.
All in all, GNOME Office didn't happen. Some bits did, though. AbiWord was always broader than GNOME. And Gnumeric is great IMHO.
And people see the future in the cloud.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GNOME project decided not to be serious with GNOME Office years and years ago. Imagine if they had put their effort into it though? Almost certainly they would have been at the forefront of desktop options and a good likelihood as a candidate for corporations.
You know it is hard to order people to do something when they aren't paid. Even project like OpenOffice.org that had commercial venture had hardship with funding. Oracle cancelled it, Novell cancelled it, IBM do whatever they want, etc. All in all, GNOME Office didn't happen. Some bits did, though. AbiWord was always broader than GNOME. And Gnumeric is great IMHO. And people see the future in the cloud.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know it is hard to order people to do something when they aren't paid. Even project like OpenOffice.org that had commercial venture had hardship with funding. Oracle cancelled it, Novell cancelled it, IBM do whatever they want, etc. All in all, GNOME Office didn't happen. Some bits did, though. AbiWord was always broader than GNOME. And Gnumeric is great IMHO. And people see the future in the cloud.
Except there was a group of people who did want to do it - Abi was a company at one point! But the Gnome guys decided to deemphasise it - that was the problem.
And Abi as a company was long gone by that time.
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.