Hi everybody
As you may know my name is Claus Desler and I am the author Cinnamon Writer. I have been invited to this thread by Joeled to comment on the status of CW and whether I would be interested in following up with a spreadsheet program.
Current status of CW:
CW is constantly being improved and its features expanded. The speed of this depends greatly on the workload of my "real" job.
CW support antialias fonts and the layout and paragraph styles that are used in roughly 99% of daily use (my own guestimate
). CW supports a rather advanced undo/redo system that in some aspects outperform even systems found in Word and OO. CW has rudimentary printing support which will be updated shortly. With the latest update of CW (oct/nov 2011) DocX support was added. This means that CW is able to exchange documents from all word processors that utilize this format (newer Word versions, newer OO versions and others). The support only relates to the features built into CW, that is images f.ex. are not supported yet.
CW is fully amiga native and was from day 1 designed with amiga in mind
Future of CW:
The logic of CW versioning is that when it reaches v 1.00, CW will have all of the features that people uses 99% of the time when using a word processor. It will not be able to do all the things that Word or OO offers, but it will concentrate on the most important and most often features used. Furthermore, I will, if possible implement these features so they function as good or better than in Word and OO.
The latest version of CW was 0.751 so we are getting close. The main points that we are missing are:
- Support for columns
- Support for images
- Support for tables
- Spellcheck
On my computer right now, I have a version where spellcheck has been integrated and is fully functional (until I find a bug). I only need to add some functionality requested by users for this version before I release it. After that I will be working on support for images and shortly thereafter on support for tables. In conclusion: I hope to have version 1.00 ready this year (with several updates during the year)
CW spreadsheet:
I have been thinking a lot about how much work it would be to make a Spreadsheet equivalent to CW, and the answer is too much if I have to do it alone. However, another solution I have been thinking about is to utilize the CW foundation and add a plug-in system where other contributors could add functionality (Think of a Cos subroutine or a statistics subroutine or a subroutine for making bar graphs or pie graphs). This is completely possible, but requires a lot of help from skilled people who knows mathematics, statistics and other-
Other platforms:
Eventhough I have primarily published CW versions for AOS, I am very interested in porting to other Amiga platforms, as such I am trying to get the latest version up and running on AROS. Similar plans also exist for porting to Morphos
How much work will I do:
The completion of any and all of these projects completely depends on whether people would want a solution like CW. People should understand that any undertaking with a project this size takes a lot of time and a lot of hard effort. Even though I could make a super-duper version of CW and follow up with a Spreadsheet program it won't really matter if people are not interesting in using/trying them because they are basically just holding out for a full port of OpenOffice . Not only me, but all developers needs some encouragement to continue their projects. This is not always the same as donations, but more importantly positive critique, good suggestions for future features or just a short reminder once in a while that a person is using the said software