AbiWord Portable 2.4.5 (USB and CD support) - Testers Needed

Howdy Guys,

Portable AbiWord is being renamed to AbiWord Portable along with the
other apps at PortableApps.com and I've been busily prepping a new
release. I've solved many of the existing issues and have even updated
the launcher to handle the issues around AbiWord's registry entries...
See bug 8312 for details on this issue:
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8312

This release includes the following new features:

Registry Changes Saved - Although AbiWord automatically reserves the abw
and zabw file types and adds another entry to the registry on the local
PC, the AbiWord Portable launcher automatically removes this when you
close AbiWord. It will even preserve your existing registry settings if
you have a local copy of AbiWord. And it has account type detection so
this will work correctly with guest and limited accounts under Windows
2000 without error.

Live CD Support - AbiWord Portable now fully supports running from a CD.
The registry backups are stored within the TEMP directory on the local
PC while running, so the location you run from doesn't need to be
writeable. Just be sure you run AbiWord Portable at least once from a
writeable location before copying it to CD so it can generate a set of
default settings.

In-Place Upgrades - AbiWord Portable now supports the ability to do what
I'm calling an "in-place upgrade". This means that you can extract it
right over an existing installation of AbiWord Portable without losing
any of your existing data and it'll Just Work (tm). Obviously, this will
be going forward as you'll need to manually upgrade this time due to the
new directory layout.

WINE Support - The new launcher has been written and tested to work with
Wine within your favorite UNIX/Linux distro. You can both install and
run AbiWord Portable within Wine without issue.

AbiWord Plugin Installation Support - The directory structure of AbiWord
Portable has been updated to work with the standard AbiWord plugin
installers right out of the box. You can download the AbiWord
Import/Export or Tools Plugins from the AbiWord download page and
install them right into AbiWord Portable. When asked for the
installation location, just be sure to change the default (C:\Program
Files\AbiSuite2) to the location of AbiWord within AbiWord Portable
(X:\AbiWordPortable\Apps\AbiSuite2).

New Splash Screen - The new splash screen will come up instantly even
while the launcher is backing up your registry entries and prepping for
launch, which is handy when running from a USB 1.1 device or slower
CDROM drive.

There's a thread about it in the forums on PortableApps.com here:
http://portableapps.com/node/2543

You can download the pre-release here:
http://portableapps.com/downloads/AbiWord_Portable_2.4.5_PRERELEASE.exe

I'd love some feedback on this update before I throw it out to the world.

Regards,
John
Received on Mon Aug 7 01:10:15 2006