OLPC and non-PNG image support

Hello folks!

I was attending the Libre Graphics Meeting these last few days in
Montreal and I had the chance to take a look at the 100$ laptop. I saw
the guy demonstrating that he could use the built-in webcam to take a
picture, and insert the JPEG image into Abiword.

I'm pretty sure you guys guessed what I told him here :)

"yeah, but there is this huge bug that Abiword does not really support
jpg, so you're actually seeing a jpg converted to png, and you will end
up with a document weighting 100MB"*

http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1349

This _needs_ to be fixed. I am dead serious. What will happen when you
have kids with laptops that completely die down when trying to open a
document they made because it now weights several dozens megabytes and
they are not even aware of it? The 100$ laptop will never have the horse
power to correct this problem*, and transferring it "outside" the laptop
with WiFi might be cumbersome and downright impossible with
non-broadband connections.

Won't somebody please think of the children? ;-)
Nekohayo

=-=-=-=-=-=-
*: now is my past experience. I got a call from my aunt a few months
ago, she was panicked and had "completely killed the computer". I
arrived and found abiword frozen to death. This was on a 2 gHz machine
with 256 Mib of RAM. I killed abiword and tried opening the document, no
joy. Then I looked at the file properties and it weighted about 110 MiB.

Only OpenOffice was able to open that file (it took a very long time).
Then I realized that all the pictures that were originally JPEGs had
been converted to full resolution PNGs. Because of that, I had to make
her use Writer instead until this bug can be dealt with.
Received on Sun May 6 17:46:29 2007