Beyond AbiWord 3.0

Dear AbiWord devs,

I am wondering if there are any plans in development on what the
priorities will be in the development cycle to follow the impending
3.0 release.

I'm not sure if all of the GSOC contributions will be landed in 3.0,
but doing that would be an obviously high priority early in the next
cycle.

Personally, I'm looking forward to working with localizers (and
Prashant) to continue the work we've started on improving the L10n of
the Windows installer by extending it to more languages.

I wanted to introduce another idea for consideration. OLPC will soon
be coming out with touch-enabled laptops (now called the XO-4), and
much of the next development cycle for Sugar Labs on the Sugar UI that
runs on the XO laptops will be completing GTK2 > GTK3 porting and
beginning the process of leveraging the new features of GTK3 for
developing touchscreen UI features for various elements of the stack.

AbiWord is part of that stack in OLPC images (on the Gnome boot side
of the Gnome- Sugar dual-boot) and AbiWord's little cousin, the Sugar
Write activity, is a very high priority on the Sugar-side of the boot
as it is the primary word processor for millions of kids. AFAICT,
Jean has already addressed the GTK porting for AbiWord, so a lot of
the critical groundwork is in place.

I wanted to know if any AbiWord devs are interested in working on
introducing touchscreen support to AbiWord, and by extension Write,
not only for OLPC, but for the growing tablet device user-base? I
would be happy to make introductions to Sugar hackers that would be
eager to collaborate with you on such an effort. There is even the
possibility of access to some extremely rare and precious
pre-production touch hardware for a developer that demonstrates a
commitment to this work. I can't promise that personally, but I have
been told that touch UI for AbiWord/Write is one of OLPC's high
priorities in the very near term (over the next few months).

I'm also interested in hearing other ideas about what AbiWord has in
mind going beyond 3.0, but I did want to toss the touch UI idea out
there early in the discussion.

cjl
Received on Sun Aug 19 16:55:03 2012