Since the student who initially asked for being my SoK student has gone silent, I'm now declaring myself available for another student.

I know some people has already come by irc asking, and I sort of turned them down. Well now is you chance to come back!

In Calligra 2.4 we disabled change tracking because it didn't have the quality we felt comfortable releasing.

Now I ask you dear users to share your requirements for the ultimate change tracking systemt. But also describe how you have been using change tracking in the past (in any application) and what was good and bad, what you felt missing, etc.

I'd like personal accounts and anything you share should be free from interlectual property claims.

Go to the forum post that I have also made.

So Thursday and Friday last week I was in Brussels for an ODF plugfest representing KO GmbH and the Calligra project. The plugfest is some kind of a mix between interacting with other ODF implementors (like Microsoft, IBM, LibreOffice etc), and a publicity event to engage the government and industry in the country where the plugfest is held.

So besides trying various interoperability scenarios, I also made a presentation about Calligra which was well received. Jos van den Oever also from KO GmbH made a presentation on WebOdf (a browser/javascript based editor). And Thorsten Zachmann from Nokia also represents Calligra, so all in all we have quite some impact.

Now back home and fast forward to Monday I got asked to join the ODF technical committee at OASIS. Jos van den Oever is already a member on behalf of KDE, and so he got me in (also for KDE). The initial purpose is to make recomendations and alterations for the next generation of change tracking in the ODF file format. I am working together with two other members of the TC, but, even though I'm not alone, I really feel the personal responsibility to make something good, as billions of people can potentially be affected.

But I've joined the real Technical Committee so I will be joining the weekly phone conferences and have my say on all matters ODF. Now, I will go slowly at first, getting acquainted with the processes and how best to get your point of view across. Luckily Thorsten and Jos will be able to help me with any insider knowledge I need.

So now with 3 TC members KDE is influencing the world of ODF even more than ever.

At Calligra we are mising several icons, including several applications icons.

So we are seeking an artist that are capable of creating oxygen compatible icons.

You will become a member of our very cool community, and take part of the revolution we are determined to make in the world of office and creative applications.

Contact us on irc channel #calligra or on our mailing list calligra-devel at kde.org

After about 2 years of development and 1½ year since we officially formed the Calligra project I'm happy that Calligra 2.4 is being released later today.

In my vision Calligra becomes a ground breaking fresh alternative to the established free and proprietary players. Calligra should create history and revolutionize it. We are not there yet, but we have great plans and are very much still evolving.

We don't believe that applications have to chose between being powerful and complex, or being dumbded down to make them easy to use. In the Calligra Words team we have this crede "powerfeatures made easy" and we are committed to making this come true by working hard on the usability as well as adding powerfeatures. And we don't want to just add configuration options. We want to create our interfaces in a way that puts all the power at your fingertips in the most intuitive way.

We know we are not there yet. As I said it's early days yet, but we have already made some new first-of-a-kind usability improvements for the next version (2.5). Let me share an example with you. In other wordprocessors when you drag the borders of a table you see a line that shows you where the border will end up. In Caligra Words 2.5 not only do you instantly see the text being relayouted, but you also get helpers that show you the width of the columns or height of rows as you manipulate them. Additionally, if you press shift while dragging a border it changes the way it moves the following column(s). Obviously using the shift key for extended functionality is not an original idea, but coupled with the innovative helper (note how it even suggests to use the shift key) this makes this powerfeature easy reachable and understandable for the avarage user.

Click for video

This underlines what I said of us wanting to be more than just another player on the market. We want to create history. We want to innovate and think out of the box. But before we could do that we had to create a solid baseline, and that is what 2.4 represents.

So for 2.4 we concentrated on becoming a solid document viewer so you would have no need to look elsewhere. And also to fulfil your daily editing needs, with quite a number of advanced features also already working.

It thus brings us great joy that early adopters of our betas and release candidates are saying that we rock and find us really usable. That is so gratifying to hear. Thank you!

And to top it off we wil begin to release new versions every 4 months or so.