Yesterday, we released KOffice 2.1, the first major release in the 2.x cycle. It brings many improvements over 2.0, providing a much more stable and rich full experience, you can read more details in the 2.1 release announcement.
While 2.0 was clearly a developer release for developer, and for testing. For 2.1, we concentrated on fixing bugs, fixing some of the annoying issues, 2.1 is coming with many improvements in the MS Office filters, but 2.1 is still lacking in many area, for instance 2.1 comes with experimental support for displaying tables and formulas, but there is no support for editing them. Also there are still many rough edge in the UI. But the progress from 2.0 are astonishing, helped by the good base libraries (Qt, KDE and koffice), external help (Kevin Otten’s student and now Nokia).
While, in general, KOffice 2.1 is still not recommended for end-users. There are two exceptions, the first one is Karbon, while far to be feature full, is starting to become a very capable vector drawing editor, in 2.1 it get support for filters (only blur in 2.1, more is coming for 2.2). I personally use it a lot these days to create illustration for my thesis work. And Krita has made big progress in stability, with dozens of crash fixes for 2.1, and also include many of the new fun painting operation from Lukas, improvement in brush dynamic, recording of filters to create macro…
I think Krita and karbon are almost ready for the end user. Though I will be using KOffice already starting from this release.
Why? The answer is simple – on my ThinkPad T42 the OpenOffice loads wayyyyyyyyyyyyy too long. And it is way too bloated. I am not OO.org basherm but using a lightweight office which is KO makes more sense to me. Moreover, I think it has more perspectives than OO.
One more comment. I would say, idea. Or, more precisely, 3 ideas.
1) I think when it comes to user interface KO can learn a lot from Blender UI. I can write it down in 1-2 pages with graphical explanations. Where could I do that – should I send you an e-mail, or it better be at KDE-look or KDE Brainstorm – this number of places for ideas confuses me a bit.
2)What about integration of KO with Akonadi? I mean, so that through Akonadi i could edit my Google documents? Again, I could make some mockups and describe the workflows.
3)Another variant of intergation of KO and Akonadi – P2P (serverless) collaborative editing of the same document through KO.