AbiWord Community Outreach Project

Rumblings about me doing my coding task (as Win32 maintainer) have been heard in the AbiSphere… This ant has about 49 times his weight carried right now, but can add that extra little bit hopefully to bring some magic to Windows in the form of nightlies and alpha releases…

I might get a bit behind on the blogs, but it will get better… Now I have to make up for this summer’s posts while Martin and Marc were making some remarkable collaboration magic happen for Abi…

Our Summer of Code student Erik Pukinskis has been hard at work doing research, UI mockups, and even some code, despite some communication problems and other issues within the OLPC design groups! Check out a screen shot of AbiWord running inside the Sugar OLPC interface here on Flickr!

Patches to add this support have hit the development mailing list, and further development is going on as I write this in the AbiWord IRC channel! Way to go, Erik! [Edit: your name was staring me in the face in that Flickr link and I still couldn’t spell it right - sorry Erik!]

For more information about his general process, visit: http://snowedin.net/archives/001035.php (See if you can find the sketch of a rabbit!)
For information about the feature set of OLPC AbiWord, visit http://snowedin.net/ideas/AbiWord+OLPC+Feature+Inventory

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2161048/nigeria-orders-olpc-laptops

From the article: “Nigeria has officially ordered and paid for one million of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) devices, according to the Nigerian Vanguard newspaper. ”

Yes, this is the same device that Erik is working on our interface for. AbiWord is proud to be the word processor of the OLPC project!

The quote in the title is from core developer Martin Sevior upon sharing the link with the AbiWord IRC channel (which you should stop by if you don’t already, it’s a good time!)

Since its release on July 9, 2006 (11 days ago - and no updated Mac OS X build yet…), the fifth bugfix release of its series, AbiWord 2.4.5 has been downloaded over 80,000 times.

About 72,000 of those downloads were for Windows. Of those Windows downloads, over 15% (11255 downloads) also got the Import/Export plugins. Over 15% of Windows downloaders (but slightly fewer than the import/export plugins rate - 11080) got the Tools plugins to go along with their new version of AbiWord.

About 8% of total downloads are source (either .tar.gz or .bz2).

Since the beginning of the month, 3815 confused people have downloaded 2.4.1 for Windows. Perhaps they are unaware that our forward and backward compatibility are stellar, and especially so within release series.

The unofficial award for highest referring release notice goes to this site in Taiwan - referred 1836 visitors. Runners up include a site in russian and this review of AbiWord which actually looks more like it was pulled from some AbiSource document, and also features the never-used D’Andrada splash screen.

Digg and the Unknown Freeware Apps article sent us more than any single 2.4.5 release announcement, however - 2034 direct links from that article came to AbiSource.com

Some 907 people arrived at AbiSource.com via the Changelog for 2.4.5 (indicating that they came from another site’s release notice that was detailed enough to link right to the Changelog)

Since the beginning of the month, over 613 gigabytes of AbiWord installers have been transferred. I believe thanks are in order for University of Twente who kindly host our server. Thanks so much for your support! Congratulations, everyone, on a great 2.4.5 release! Just imagine what the future releases have in store…

Just a sample of end-user pleasure thanks to AbiWord - http://gnomedesktop.org/node/2716#comment-41424

Rock on, ants!

(Figures are approximate and do not include downloads through distributors or other third-party sites, updated as of about 20-Jul-2006 04:41 CEST)