Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

AbiWord 2.3.4 has finally been build for MacOS X. The build should work on Jaguar (MacOS X 10.2) unlike previous one. On Mac, it does not bring much things, but a few bug fixes: crash, memory leaks, and broken cut and paste.

Disk Image - Source for Mac

Back from Ottawa and Desktop Developer Conference. I now have my head full of nice ideas for AbiWord, some crazy, some less:

Use UniConf for the preferences. This would be more a proof of concept and a toy to play with than a real feature for AbiWord. I don't see that very hard to do. Add that to my crazyness.

Write a Cairo backend for AbiWord. This is more sane, and somewhat a big work, but it is good crack. Here are the reasons:

Pro:

• one backend for Mac, Win and Gtk. Bug will be down to Cairo and not to each platform...
• SVG support will be way easier. We need SVG support.

Cons:

• Cairo maturity. But if nobody use it, who will test it ? AbiWord pioneered with XML for the file format.
• One more dependency, which seems to be a concern for win32 developers. Nothing that can't be solved.
• Performance. Again, that will give a real test case.

And I think I'll move my Gtk+-MacOS X work in gtk+-2.7 branch (I mean rebranch from there) to use Cairo as well. Now it makes sense.

I built AbiWord 2.3.2+CVS yesterday on MacOS X. It is available here. The source tarball is here. Unfortunately the binary requires MacOS X 10.3 (Panther), due to some run time issues. The source can be build on MacOS X 10.2 without problems.

These are development quality builds.

I now have a MacMini with Tiger at the office because we need it as our product support Mac clients (thanks to Netatalk). I find Tiger faster than Panther on the same hardware. I mean almost same, my MacMini has 1GB with Panther.

I installed everything that is needed and now build AbiWord on Tiger. Beside a few glitches and changes in fribidi, and bug 9030, it did work well.

gcc4 is actually much more strict, so comparing the result of an Obj-C method declared to void with a bool does not work. That is a good thing, even if it leads to some pain. I'm not sure if I'll backport this fix to 2.2.x, even if I could easily.

Now I have to fix a few major bugs, and think about putting back the toolbars to the main document window as people seem to prefer.

Since 2.3.2 has been released, I might release a post 2.3.2-cvs version binary for MacOS X. The first in 2.3.x series, at last.

current music: Das Modell - Kraftwerk

$cvs -qz3 update -Pd|grep ^R | wc -l

228

Removing the 228 source files needed for BeOS support in AbiWord. The main reason that we have been looking for a maintainer, and nobody seems to bother. So it is worthless to keep that code around in the current tree. Actually it cost us.

For code can still be retrieved from the 2.3.1 tarball, or from CVS, but not from HEAD.