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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    history!
From:       Jos Poortvliet <jospoortvliet () gmail ! com>
Date:       2009-02-27 20:53:32
Message-ID: 5847e5cf0902271253p447baf54u1f59afb900a870b0 () mail ! gmail ! com
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Hi all,

As I promised, I started working on the visual guide. Well, started,
there is nothing yet, I just decided to start ;-)

As introduction, I think it would be good to start with a very brief
history, in the form of:

========
KOffice development began in xxxx. Since that time, many developers
(*can I say hundreds?*) have contributed to its evolution. The KOffice
1.x series became a rather reliable and powerful office suite with a
decent number of users. X years ago, the core developers decided to
take the necesairy porting to the KDE 4 foundations as an opportunity
for a fundamental redesign of the KOffice suite. Based on the years of
experience in developing this office suite, they knew the boundaries
of what was possible on the current infrastructure where closing in.
Without significant changes, development would become very complex,
making it harder for new developers to contribute. The work on KOffice
2 was thus started. The intention was to increase integration between
the components of KOffice, decreasing duplication of functionality and
easing maintenance and development of new features. Furthermore, new
approaches to UI design and interacting with the user have been
implemented to support the new capabilities.

Now, after X years of development, the 2.0 version is ready. It marks
a point where the new infrastructure has stabilized significantly, and
it is time to present it to the world. Currently KOffice forms a
highly integrated office suite with an novel interface but still
lacking many advanced features. Despite that, the team believes it is
ready for new developers to take advantage of it's innovative design.
Users are invited to try the new interface paradigm and experiment
with the new features.

Only part of the full suite has been considered mature enough for
release. This Visual Guide will show the current state of the
applications part of this release, guiding the reader through creating
several documents and exploring the posibilities of KOffice 2.
==================

Of course, the above is just a very first version of the introduction,
and I'd like to hear any input - even if you think it's total rubish
and we shouldn't teach history to readers of the visual guide ;-)

And who can fill in the dates?

I already have been looking at features to write about. I take it this
page contains the features:
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Schedules/KOffice/2.0/Feature_Plan
If it is not complete nor up-to-date, I'll be having a hard time, so I
hereby ask everyone to try to take a few minutes to update it ;-)

As for the writing itself, I think this guide has to be different from
the KDE 4.2 feature guide. In that guide, I detailed the features
added since KDE 4.1. As KOffice 2.0 is radically different from 1.x,
this visual guide probably has to start from scratch, so to speak - a
much harder task, but I think we'll manage ;-)

Of course I'll be needing help. I'll be reading blogs and such, but I
will also email individual developers with questions, and use this
mailinglist. Hope that's OK...

Thanks,

Jos Poortvliet
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