Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

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Wednesday 19 January 2005 14:08, by Diary of a CrazyFrench :: #

AbiWord vs Pages, part 2.

I still haven't had my hands on Pages, because I don't have either the software, nor the hardware to run it. But MacGeneration has a review (fr) of the product. From what it shows, it is a full fledged application, more page oriented than text...

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Thursday 13 January 2005 18:58, by Sean :: #

Hmm, that's a lot of space, but is that in *any* way a fair comparison? Pages comes with a ton of graphics and templates, charting engine, etc. I know you didn't claim otherwise, but just because Pages takes a lot of space doesn't mean it's bloated or wasteful. It just might mean that it does a lot more. Which can be useful - I like Abiword more than OOo, for example, but I have to use OOo Writer because Abiword just doesn't do somethings I need, such as extensive frames support or style sheets.

Thursday 13 January 2005 20:30, by Eugenia :: site :: #

On the other hand, AbiWord is extremely buggy on the Mac platform and it has probably never got under heavy testing via a specialist QA team but relied on random bug reports by random users (and only when they felt compelled to file them).

You see, I just downloaded AbiWord 2.2.3 last night on my Mac and I removed it 10 minutes later when visual artifacts appeared in the document out of nowhere while writing some simple text.

I know that you have put a lot of time and work on this port, and I truly appreciate this. But I bet that Pages is far more stable than AbiWord, simply because it has a full QA team behind it kicking the sh*t out of it in testing for months now. And that's a big plus for many consumers.

Thursday 13 January 2005 22:21, by Eugenia :: site :: #

I decided to reinstall Abiword on my Mac to have a second look. In the very short time I tried it, I also noticed two more things:
1. When typing is actually pretty slow on my 867 Mhz G4 Powerbook. I can almost see the characters getting typed one by one with a lag.
2. AbiWord is not "Desktop Manager"-friendly. The Tool-Palette is showing on all virtual desktops instead of just one. Additionally, when pressing F9/F10/F11, the ToolPalette window is misbehaving and it does not behave as expected.
3. The visual artifacts with random characters appearing on the document is indeed a reproducible problem.
4. Would be nice if the toolbars and ToolPalette were polished a bit to fit the whole thing in 1024x768 screens (in a setup with the Dock auto-hidden or smaller than the default), because most mac users use ibooks or older i/macs with xga resolutions.
5. Would be nice if Abiword could remember how the user left his/her ToolPalette status from the previous session.

It's little things like that that show the polish (or not) of a software application.

Thursday 13 January 2005 23:46, by ... :: #

Why would you "file" bugs/enhancement requests in a blog comment instead of AbiWord's bugzilla?

Friday 14 January 2005 00:35, by dude1 :: #

How much space does the clipart and templates take in Abiword? Oh that's right, it doesn't include any. However, that doesn't stop you from counting the clipart and templates as part of the size of Pages.

Friday 14 January 2005 09:47, by Eugenia :: site :: #

Two more in another 2 minutes I used the app:
1. If I press to select the "table toolbar" from the preferences and click "Apply" the change is not happen.
2. The ToolPalette is keep loading each time I start AbiWord, even if I had closed it in my previous session. There is no way to get rid of it by default. The reason I have a beef about it is because the main toolbar of AbiWord contains the same items as the ToolPalette, and both load by default. This is duplication, and it's a major UI mistake.

Overall, in 20 minutes of using the app overall the last 3 days, I found about 8-10 bugs/problems. That's almost 1 bug every 2 minutes. IMHO, AbiWord for Mac should be dubbed "alpha" and not 2.2.3-final.

I am confident that Pages will have a better record in its 1.0 release in terms of bugs. Bugs will be there of course, but harder to spot and fewer in numbers.

Saturday 20 April 2024 03:35, by :: #

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