Development Builds of Cocoa AbiWord for MacOSX

• June 11th, 2005: AbiWord-20050611.dmg [7.6MB]

  Attempt to fix Bug 8858 (a crash-on-start-up bug).

• June 6th, 2005: AbiWord-2.2.8.dmg [7.6MB]

  I haven't properly tested this build. Fingers crossed...

  As you may have noticed, I haven't been developing CocoaAbi recently, for which I can only beg your forgiveness. I don't know when I'll get back to it. Fear not, though. Hub, the originator of the Cocoa port, is back in action and will be looking after things again.

• April 4th, 2005: AbiWord-2.2.7.dmg [7.6MB]

  Don't ask me.

• April 3rd, 2005: AbiWord-2.2.6.dmg [7.6MB]

  The AbiWord build system has been updated slightly and is also now built against the 10.2.8 SDK. (I'm not sure what the effects of these changes are yet.)

  • Finish work on the Table of Contents dialog.
  • Fix crashes in the Merge/Split Cells dialogs.
  • Fix a hang in the Insert Table dialog to do with broken input.
  • Fix Zoom dialog's handling of percentages.
  • Tweaks to MetaData (Document Properties) and Insert Field dialogs.
• March 31st, 2005: AbiWord-20050331.dmg [7.6MB]
  • The Tool Palette now supports display and selection of particular members of the current font family; in addition, the pop-up buttons display the font names in their own fonts (although this may not be a permanent feature - let me know if you have strong feelings either way).
  • Some work on the Table of Contents dialog.
  • UI-related tweaks: Bugs 8547, 8636, 8637, 8638, 8639, 8640, 8643 and 8689.
• March 7th, 2005: AbiWord-20050307.dmg [7.6MB]

  I've corrected the way the plug-ins are linked, which I hope will fix some of the various problems seen by some OS X 10.2 users. The application also seems to have grown somewhat, I'm not entirely sure why, but probably related to the change in linking. (I'm making this version available also as a zip.)

• March 6th, 2005

  Our main QA guy, sum1, has had access to a Mac recently and has been filing a large number of bugs, which I've been doing my best to fix, so if CocoaAbi is improving quickly it's mostly thanks to him.

  • Fix some crashers: Bugs 7809, 8526, 8547, 8548.
  • UI-related tweaks: Bugs 8524, 8549, 8550, 8551, 8553, 8554, 8555, 8566, 8567, 8569, 8571.
  • CocoaPlugin API: selectWord, selectedText and insertText: document methods.
• March 2nd, 2005: AbiWord-2.2.5.dmg [6MB]
  • Now you can type in the comboboxes in the toolbars. (I have reduced the number of font sizes listed, though.)
  • Stop the RTF importer from changing Helvetica into Helvetic. (Silly thing to do, if you ask me.)
  • Fix ruler units for mm and fix pica and points units in Preferences.
  • Adjust zoom (Page Width and Whole Page) for new and resized documents.
  • If no documents are open, revert to the default document size for the next.
  • Fix Stylist dialog (really rather broken) and make it a little smaller.
  • Adjust Table->Insert->Table... dialog and limit the spinners to 1..64 columns and 1..500 rows.
  • The Choose Document dialog crashed if there were any untitled documents; these are now listed as "(untitled)" (hardly ideal, I know).
  • Searching the document for the string "" is apparently a bad idea (who'd've thought?) so: don't!
  • Another update of AbiWord's Info.plist (thanks again sardisson!).
  • It is now possible to load plugins by selecting them in the Finder - not that anyone but me ever does this.
  • The new Cocoa plugin API now provides version information; plus a new method (completely untested) to add items to the context menu.
• February 25th, 2005
  • Add a faint border to the toolbars.
  • Update AbiWord's Info.plist (thanks sardisson!) to make AbiWord play better with the Finder (MIME types, OS types and more file extensions recognized). Also, it is now possible to open WordPerfect documents at launch time.
• February 21st, 2005
  • Font names are accepted when given instead of font family names. This is not an ideal solution.
  • AbiWord's RTF importer turns Helvetica into Helvetic - this is a pain. Treat these as equivalent. I hate this.
  • Fix a crash that would occur sometimes at exit to do with deallocating fonts improperly.
  • Fix Info.plist - let's you put AbiWord into the Dock again.
  • Updated README documentation - my thanks to Donald Smith and Andy Staines for prompting and feedback.
  • Automatically create application folders on start-up.
  • Fix some NSTableView elements which had the Editable flag set.
  • Animate ToolPalette resizing.
  • Tools->Language... dialog now has an option to set the default language for new documents. (I'm not entirely sure this works.)
  • File->New using Template... dialog no longer has the start empty option.
  • The WordPerfect importer plugin now uses libwpd 0.8!
  • More Mail Merge support in the new Cocoa plugin API.
• January 23rd, 2005
  • Fix the toolbars! Sorry!
  • Some more work towards supporting Cocoa plugins (bundles); deactivated plugins now greyed out in the Tools->Plugins... dialog.
• January 20th, 2005
  • Toolbar & Tool Palette buttons (and thus Toolbar height and Tool Palette width) are slightly smaller now.
  • Toolbars are separated, and the large background bar is no longer there - which makes the toolbars look a little odd, but I think it's a slight improvement. The toolbars also rearrange themselves a little, depending on screen width.
  • Initial document window size is slightly better (all things being relative).
  • Format->Page->Background Color... dialog implemented.
  • Insert->Mail Merge Field... dialog implemented (although mail merge itself may not be - I plan to look into this).
  • Some work towards supporting Cocoa plugins (bundles); visible changes to the Tools->Plugins... dialog.
• January 9th, 2005
  • Check marks in menu items update properly.
  • Foreground & background color buttons on toolbar pop up a color selector.
  • The proxy icon in the title bar should behave properly now.
  • Insert->Field dialog fixed.
  • File->Page Setup (a.k.a. Format->Document) dialog reworked - it's now possible to set page size and orientation.
• January 6th, 2005
  • Happy New Year!
  • Much improved File->Open/Save dialog (at least on Panther, not sure about Jaguar) including image preview for Insert->Picture.
  • Lots of work on formatting text boxes; also, left ruler no longer disappears while editing a text box.
  • Some work on cursors, although they don't really behave as well as they should.
  • Better line thickness, and scaling of dots and dashes.
• December 22nd, 2004
  • WARNING: This build is strictly for testing of new features.
  • Prettier rulers.
  • I'm playing around with File->Open/Save dialog at the moment so it may behave strangely.
• December 21st, 2004
  • Fix list bullits (sp?) weirdness.
  • View complex input (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and accented special characters) in the document as you type.
  • Add Panels submenu to Window menu with items for Tool Palette and Preview Panel - these are no longer in the Dock menu.
• December 13th, 2004

  Gosh! What excitement! AbiWord-2.2.0 for MacOSX was sitting quietly on SourceForge waiting to become official when what happened? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Well, Version Tracker noticed it, I suppose, so lots of impatient Mac people got to see AbiWord-2.2 semi-officially while the rest of the semi-civilized world had to wait ages and ages for the AbiWord developers to get their act together and release AbiWord-2.2.1!

  Which they eventually did. Yay! Yay! Yay! Announced on SlashDot to much critical acclaim (with the emphasis of course on critical, naturally enough, though I think we were expecting to be flamed, roasted, etc.). Er, hold on. Did you say 2.2.1? Where was AbiWord-2.2.1 for MacOSX? Well, that was hastily (but admittedly belatedly) uploaded with a few post-official-release bug fixes (simply had to get a working Insert Symbol dialog - 'working' in the sense of not crashing AbiWord, that is).

  Anyway. With 2.2 announced, and AbiWords-2.2.0 and -2.2.1 available, there was plenty of opportunity for you Mac folk (Note: if you're not a Mac folk, perhaps you should be? Think about it...) to complain about every little deviation from the perfection you have come to expect, nay, demand, from your Apple applications!

  Sigh.

  Friends, bloggers, netizens, lend me your eyes! I come to build Abi, not to praise her!

  Well, thankfully, we persuaded some of these excellent and insightful testers to file bugs instead of simply complain about AbiWord, and the result, I'm exceedingly proud to say, is the Marginally Better AbiWord-2.2.2!!!

  It's far from perfect, I know, I know, (look, I said: I know! grr...) but I would let her date my sister. (Well, no, that's a lie.)

  [Before you all write in, which I know you won't, but anyway, Abi the Ant is female and I'm deliberately conflating Abi and AbiWord, the word processor, but since it gives me a chance to ramble on insanely like this, and also to use words like conflate, I'm not going to apologize.]

  To the point. Today's exciting new features include:

  • Lots of people were complaining about the style of the toolbars being archaic. Well, the buttons are borderless now and I hope you like them.
  • Toolbar buttons have tooltips now.
  • Toolbar no longer takes keyboard focus away from the document.
  • Neither does the Stylist dialog.
  • The About dialog's text starts at the top now.
  • GoTo and Find/Replace dialogs appear with keyboard focus. (Has anyone noticed that these are actually the same dialog twice? Weird.)
  • Oh, Find/Replace will now search the correct document.
  • Lots of work getting short-cuts (key equivalents) to work, since these were all being sent to the current document instead of where they were supposed to go, tsk tsk, - and now you can also cut/copy/paste/select-all in dialog text fields using the familiar Command-X/C/V/A (which you couldn't do before but because of all the other bugs you didn't know that). In fact, I've remapped the short-cuts in the menus to match, to some extent, the familiar Text Edit short-cuts.
  • New windows cascade, although the toolbars get in the way a little.
  • Some alert panels have better button ordering, and all should have an extra line of information.
  • Fixed a bug that I don't think anyone had ever noticed, to do with objects being autoreleased without a pool. (I guess it's a long drop.)
  • Fixed a bug that caused crashes or other weird behaviour after loading a document. (Don't worry, there are still plenty of other ways to crash AbiWord.)
  • Completely rewrote the way the main menu is created. The Window menu is now a proper Window menu (although I removed the Zoom button), and the AbiWord menu only has the one set of Services-...-Quit buttons. (NOTE: Unfortunately, the dock menu is temporarily missing the Preview Panel and Tool Palette buttons.)
• November 30th, 2004: AbiWord-20041130.dmg.gz [6MB]
  • IMPORTANT: Anyone who downloaded the previous (Nov. 28th) release and used the new preferences dialog should delete /Users/YOU/Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/AbiSuite.Profile.
  • Karl Koehler has done some work on improving bi-directional text input and glyph shaping. Try it out...
• November 28th, 2004
  • Fix bug causing document style names mysteriously turning into random oriental characters when importing Word documents.
  • Includes new Options dialog. (NOTE: Not fully functional, but the old one was causing a crash when used with no open documents.)
  • More work on plug-ins. The Plug-in Manager dialog works now, and this build also includes the plugins:
    • AbiLaTeX - export to LaTeX. (Any volunteers to help develop this?)
    • AbiGoogle - context menu entry to search Google with the current selection.
    • AbiURLDict - context menu entry to search DICT.org with the current selection.
    • AbiWikipedia - context menu entry to search (the English) Wikipedia (a web encyclopedia) with the current selection.
• November 27th, 2004
  • WARNING: This build is strictly for testing of new features.
  • Working on plug-ins. This build includes:
    • AbiBZ2 - import & export of bzip2-compressed AbiWord documents.
    • AbiOpenWriter - import & export of OpenOffice Writer documents.
    • AbiSDW - import of StarWriter (up to 5.x) documents.
    • AbiWordPerfect - import of WordPerfect documents.
    • AbiXHTML - import of HTML document's via libxml2's html parser (please select this explicitly in the File-Open dialog).
• November 21st, 2004
  • This build uses enchant as the spelling back-end, and has plug-ins for (a) ispell and the traditional abispell dictionaries, and (b) Apple's MacOSX dictionaries, which (as far as I can tell) are:
    • Dutch (Netherlands)
    • English (Australia) [Panther Only]
    • English (Canada)
    • English (UK)
    • English (US)
    • French (France)
    • German (Germany)
    • Italian (Italy)
    • Portuguese (Portugal)
    • Portuguese (Brasil)
    • Spanish (Spain)
    • Swedish (Sweden)
  • NOTE: New Options dialog not included in this build.
• November 18th, 2004
  • Should work on Jaguar.
  • NOTE: New Options dialog not included in this build.
• November 15th, 2004
  • WARNING: This build is strictly for testing of new features.
  • Can someone please see whether this release works on Jaguar?
  • New fix for menu short-cuts that should also work with Jaguar.
  • Fix hang that occurred when changing preferences.
• November 12th, 2004
  • WARNING: This build is strictly for testing of new features.
  • Can someone please see whether this release works on Jaguar? (It doesn't.)
  • Cut & Paste of non-ANSI characters between AbiWord and other applications should work better now. (Thanks to Karl Koehler for help with this.)
  • The new AbiWord document icon now covers .zabw also.
• November 7th, 2004
  • WARNING: This build is strictly for testing of new features.
  • The Options dialog is currently being reworked. You can change the interface language there (you need to restart AbiWord for this to take effect).
  • Some improvement in handling Chinese/Korean/Japanese input. There's an input preview box in the Extra palette, or you can get a floating panel by selecting the Preview Panel item in the Dock menu.
• October 31st, 2004
  • Happiness: Finally fixed that selection bug!
  • Ryan's classy new AbiWord document icons for .abw, .bak~ & .CRASHED.
  • The disc image's folder should have a background image now, but I haven't been able to automate this. Please help if you can.
  • Dock's menu's Quit button will now make AbiWord ask about unsaved documents before it exits.
  • Fixed (I hope) the crash that occurs sometimes when documents are brought on-screen after, e.g., being miniaturized in the Dock.
  • Print-Preview (which can't be implemented, as far as I can tell), topline & bottomline (both deprecated and anyway rather buggy) buttons removed from Tool Palette, and some reorganization of the other buttons.
  • Some drawing improvements.
  • Spell-check dialog works now.
  • Updated Format-Image dialog, though I'm not sure how well the new options are implemented...
• October 25th, 2004
  • Untitled files will now auto-save to the user's Desktop. The Options (Preferences) dialog has been fixed so that auto-save period is recorded. Files with extensions .bak~ (and also .CRASHED) have a new icon.
  • Various toolbar changes. Removing them all no longer forces you to restart AbiWord to get them back. Focus returns to document after combo/pop-up selection/editing (I made the fonts and styles combo boxes into pop-up buttons). The toolbar button layout has been tightened slightly, and the combo/pop-up buttons made wider.
  • Tool palette: Document styles are now alphabetic. I've added little switches beside the color buttons - these are a work in progress and may change/vanish later. There's a new "Properties" palette which I find useful but may be confined to DEBUG builds at a later date.
  • Only include AbiWord templates in the template list in New-from-Template dialog.
  • Barbarisms code will now work, though barbarism data is only provided for ca-ES, en-AU & es-MX.
  • Editted documents are now marked as such in the tradition MacOSX way - with a dot in the red close button.
  • WARNING: A known (and very irritating) bug in this and the last two releases is that redraw isn't working properly so that the current selection, and any changes applied to a selection, are not immediately visible. Scroll up or down a page and back to check you've done what you expected.
• October 19th, 2004
  • Finally built wv against glib-2.0 & libiconv, so I'm feeling a lot more optimistic about MSWord-DOC import - give it a spin...
  • Allow fonts starting with "." or "#". (Does anyone understand why these might be problematic?)
  • Font dialog fixed.
  • Insert-Section dialog fixed.
  • New-from-Template dialog fixed.
  • More screen-painting fixes from Remi Payette.
  • Tool Palette on/off item added to dock menu.
  • Tool Palette redesigned following criticism of excessive width & icky blue of titles.
  • Text foreground/background color buttons implemented in Tool Palette, but currently no support for "Automatic" colors. (Any recommendations?)
• October 13th, 2004
  • Contextual menus should work now.
  • Extending selection using shift + left/right cursor should work.
  • Various screen-painting fixes from Remi Payette (with more to come).
  • Recent files menu won't be greyed out when no documents are open.
  • Added a dock menu.
  • Fixed the splash window (these things are so important).
  • Fixed the About window.
  • New tool palette.
• October 5th, 2004
  • Menu shortcuts fixed - no need to use menus first.
  • Scroll wheel and right-click should work now.
  • Spell-checking should work now, with English(US) dictionary included; other dictionaries can be used - get 'Big-Endian' ispell hashes from the abispell package and put them in /Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/dictionary/ or /Users/YOU/Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/dictionary/.
  • Similarly, the default template (normal.awt) can be modified and saved in /Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/templates/ or /Users/YOU/Library/Application Support/AbiSuite/templates/.
• October 3rd, 2004
  • New build to celebrate my return to AbiWord development.