Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Let's go with guerilla installation of AbiWord. Install AbiWord everywhere on Windows machine (with approval of course) or just use it from a USB thumb drive. Here is the announcement I'm reposting:

From: <cspurrier_at_craigweb.net>
Date: Sat Jan 22 2005 - 21:17:29 CET

Announcing AbiWord for Thumb Drives (an unofficial version)

AbiWord for Thumb Drives for Windows is an unofficial
modified version designed for use on USB Thumb/Pen Drives. It was created by
Craigweb. AbiWord for Thumb Drives is based off of AbiWord 2.2.3.

Download it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/abiwordftd/

I haven't tested it personnaly. Have fun.

Source: abiword-user mailing list.

Some unknown benefactor advertise AbiWord on Google if you search for "word". May he be thanked. And we end up being on page 2 of the search results.

Thanks to Alan for pointing that out.

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 oriented. Apparently their Word importer is not as good as it could be (the feature noted down in the article as not being imported are supported in AbiWord) but it seems to do a decent job. I suspect they use the .doc filter that is in MacOS X 10.3.

I can't really tell more as I don't have it in hand.

And for those who still wonder, my previous comparison was sort of a joke, because often people complain about the disk space that take OpenOffice.org or MS-Office.

Looks like to some extent, that AbiWord has a good competitor on MacOS X. I wish I could do something myself.

AbiWord 2.2.3 has been released. Here is the announcement:

AbiWord v2.2.3 Released

We are happy to announce the availability of AbiWord v2.2.3. This
release contains a great amount of bug fixes and improvements over the
previous release. This is especially true for the MacOSX platform

We would like to thank all users who took the time to submit bugreports,
notifying us of possible improvements or bugs. A great number of them
has been addressed, which we hope is noticeable.

This release is a bugfix release only. The changes from 2.2.2 to 2.2.3
include, amongst others:

* Extensive MacOSX port improvements
* Fixed a number of crashes related to image wrapping, textbox handling
and maintaining document histories
* Several Table of Contents, Format TextBox and Format table dialog
enhancements in the Windows port

The full Changelog can be found at
http://www.abisource.com/changelogs/2.2.3.phtml

As always, users are advised to upgrade to this new version.

Availability
Main site: http://www.abisource.com/download/.

More information
Main site: http://www.abisource.com/.

Enjoy!

   The AbiWord Development Team

No Mac version of OpenOffice 2.0, at least without X11. Looks like they don't catch up with the "Aqua" version development because they don't put the resources in. And didn't they pretend that OpenOffice.org was portable ? AbiWord has often be criticized for its cross-platform approach which still require lot of work. But at least we have aversion of AbiWord that does not require X11 on MacOS X.

(link provided by MacSlash)

First comparison beetween AbiWord on MacOS X and iWork: the disk space required. According to this article from Mac4Ever (fr), Pages, the word processor application from iWork require 448MB to install. In the other side, AbiWord on MacOS X uses 18MB.

Lightweight install: AbiWord: 1, iWork: 0

Update (01/14): This was intended to be some humoristic comment. I don't have the software, and I don't even have the hardware to run it, as my PowerBook, running Linux, is not enough according the their specs (given that I install MacOS X), because Pages require 500MHz processor.

Update: You can thanks the people that confuse this blog with a tech support area. I'm closing the comments for this one.

Now that the AbiWord tree is branched, I wonder if I should ditch the BeOS code. It is not intrusive, but it is there, and it annoys me since no one touched in years: version 2.2 does not even compile on that platform.

Or shall I just leave it here in the hope that it gets updated ?

I already ditched the MacOS classic and Carbon code from the tree, but to replace it with the Cocoa code as it was decided that the Mac port would require MacOS X, with a good reason.

I still wonder what to do.