Excerpts from Daniel Carrera's notes to the odf-discuss list.

16 Dec 2006
The long-awaited update to the Fellowship's OpenDocument viewer is now ready for your downloading pleasure. I am pleased to announce the release of the first beta release of the viewer. A quick summary:

* Summary:
The viewer is looking great. It is perfectly usable for general users. It feels fairly polished and complete but with just a simple UI. Users and developers should find it useful as it is. Download from: http://opendocumentfellowship.org/odfviewer

* Format support:
Thanks to the fantastic work of Roman Fordinal and Eugene Prigorodov, the viewer now supports OpenDocument presentations and spreadsheets. While work on these formats is on-going, I think you will be pleased with the current status.

Spreadsheets: Support is solid. Almost everything should work except: shadows, vertical text, DataPilot tables and default column cell styles.

Presentations: Support is solid BUT there is a bug in OOo which makes it save the wrong background colour on slides. *We* implement the feature correctly, OOo doesn't. We've filed a bug report:
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=72134
Please vote for this bug.

If it looks like OOo won't fix this bug soon, we can add a simple patch to make the viewer deal with the OOo bug, but we want to avoid that if possible.

* Viewer UI:
Thanks to the work of Alex Hudson and a few minor bits from your humble servant the viewer now has a more polished feel. It includes a proper search function, document properties, print preview and text size scaling. One feature that developers will love is "view ODF source".

* Plan for 1.0:
Format support is on-going. As for the UI, we are not yet at a UI freeze, but we will not implement new major features before the 1.0 release. There's much bug-fixing to do, and we'd like to add a "save a copy" feature.

I really hope to figure out how to make the 'About' function appear in the conventional place for Mac applications, but I've had no luck so far. This may be a problem without a solution.

* When will 1.0 be ready?
Sadly, not this year. There is enough work to do that I believe we should have at least one more beta and maybe two before the first Release Candidate.

* Postponed features:
Sadly, tabbed browsing will _not_ feature in the first major release. It's not that it can't be done. It's just that we're busy working on things that are more important. Ditto for supporting "track changes".

In a future release we could also trim down xulrunner to reduce the download size. But we will not do that for this release.

Lastly, a big big thank you to everyone who made this viewer possible:

* Roman Fordinal
* Eugene Prigorodov
* Alex Hudson
* Your humble servant :)
* And our sponsor who made it possible to contract a great team of
developers to work on this very important project.

:-)

20 Dec 2006
A new version of the Linux installer. IMO, a solid improvement over the last one. Notice that the packaging format changed. I updated the instructions too.

* This package contains everything, all the dependencies. No Internet connection needed.

* The menu entry seems to work now. :-D That is, it should add an entry to your Gnome or KDE menu.

* Now it installs to /opt/odfellowship which is more LSB-compliant.

* The package is just better designed. For example, it includes proper dependency checking to see that xulrunner is available and is the right version before trying to install the viewer proper.