RE: Feedback

From: Alan Horkan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Sun Mar 03 2002 - 02:01:13 GMT

  • Next message: peter@ranui.org.nz: "RE: Feedback"

    "Xerox Never came up with anything orignal"

    its a joke, made all the funnier by the fact that they came up with a lot
    of the Graphical desktop and office suite concepts. There are also
    plenty of other people besides Microsoft who did similar things, Lotus,
    Corel (and the more recent Star Office).

    Software patents are an absurdity, hopefully abiword wont ever
    problems with software patents (just dont ask for GIF support).

    The Abiword architecture is designed to be very modular. Many of the
    future features will be implemented as optional components (plugins, or
    you could compile your own version). 'Orthogonal seperability' is the
    computer science term for it.

    Abiword has Perl Scripting, scripting for other languages could be added,
    but always remember that Abiword is a volunteer project and scripting in
    other langauges would be a low priority. (I beleive Open office allows
    you to use Javascript).

    Abiword will inevitably gain more and more features, but there will
    usually be an option to turn things on/off, or failing that you will
    _always_ have the code. (if you dont know how to program you still have
    the choice to hire someone who does, just as you would get someone to fix
    your toaster. Thats a choice i bet you'll never have with
    Microsoft.)

    On Sat, 2 Mar 2002, Sanity in Anarchy wrote:

    > Windows and a Macintosh from the same era! I've even heard the code was
    > stolen, though I can't back that up.

    not stolen, inspired by ...

    > >The one thing I *would* like is drag and drop editing. That to me is a

    the Gnome version have better drag and drop functionality. im not sure
    exactly what you mean by 'drag and drop editing'.

    > I'd appreciate it if word processors got dumber! It's supposed to be a
    > typewriter, not an editor! Example: In MS Word, by default, typing "Dear

    The problem is that many people have different ideas of what a word
    processor is. Text editing, word processing, desktop publishing all blur
    together.

    > ____," and hitting enter brings up an animated "Office Asistant" to help you
    > with writing a letter! We know how to write letters!

    Business or Formal? American or European style?
    Help and documentation are necessary, its just the implementation that
    sucked.

    > Also, though it's nice sometimes to be lazy and let Word capitalize the first
    > letter of every sentence, I rarely seriously miss that, because what if I

    That feature used to really annoy me, it had an especially annoy habit of
    correcting the capitalisation for me even after i had just undone its
    changes.

    > don't want it capitalized? I have to exploit some unintelligent programming on
    > their part or I have to have ugly text.

    programming is difficult.

    > So drag-and-drop would be nice, but no AI with it please! Or at least have it

    AI is often actually just a really well programmed flexible algorithm that
    provides sensible options in a wide variety of situations.

    Any way, im on dialup, the local telecommunication network to busy
    bleeding its customer for every last penny on ISDN to bring in DSL or real
    broadband access, and politicians are too technology ignorant to realise
    how important it is to our economy.

    please keep using Abiword. if you can crash Abiword then help us figure
    out whats wrong and fix it. you can contribute.

    Sincerely
    Alan Horkan



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