People kept arriving after us, and are still arriving. And right now, it is the usual friday night, computers on the table, people talking about difference between Russian and Slovak, other being more serious and fixing bugs, unit tests, discussing patches, refactoring… Or simply talking about the meaning of life.

Soon we are going to head out and eat food.

But this release also brings new features, such as a slide sorter view, or support for viewing annimations in KPresenter (as shown in the video below), a new color selector or canvas rotation in Krita. More detailed information available in the KOffice 2.3.0 changelog.

Also I am making the last stand alone release of Braindump 0.10.0, since the next releases will be done as part of the Calligra Familly.

And for those who has forgotten what Braindump is, here is a video:

I have been delaying that release because I wanted to make a video of Braindump in action, and have been too lazy to make one until now. On that video I first create new whiteboards, then I demonstrate how to add shapes, manipulate them, and finally the different layout:

I you look at Braindump development history, you will notice that over the past six months the development has been really slow, there are a few reasons to that, the first one is that most of the development is done by other people than me in the KOffice repository, the second one is that I feel that Braindump is already doing exactly what I want, with a few glitches, but as a geek I tend to live happily with those…

That said there is a couple of features I want:

• Search (and replace)
• Tagging, but then someone else (yeah again) is doing the work for me in KOffice
• Auto-growing text shape
• A solution to this problem: (almost) each time I create a new whiteboard, the first thing I do is to add a text shape. So I wonder about either having always a permanent text shape in the background, or always add a text shape when creating a white board.

I am also starting to be curious about ownCloud, since personally I find it to be the right direction of cloud computing, so I would probably be interested in the possibility of storing whiteboards on an ownCloud server. Lets see how it evolves.

If you have other ideas, do not hesitate to mention them, who knows, if I find them interesting, I might go on and implement them !

Download Braindump 0.8.0, this release will work only with KOffice 2.1.x, from now on I will work on porting Braindump to the upcoming KOffice 2.2.

For those who wonder why I did, apparently, start from scratch instead of helping with the port of a similar tool (like basket), the main two reasons is that I wanted to write a non-koffice based application to test the limit of the use of flake outside the koffice document based world, and the second reason is that I think that flake is the right technologie to do it:

• it gives for free a lot of shapes (texts, images, music, chart… other still in developement such as formula, marble… or in planning: video)
• if I miss a shape (such as a todo/progress), writting it is rather easy and makes it available for reuse
• it also gives quick access to ODF capabilities (for copy/paste, and importing/exporting information)
• and currently someone is adding change tracking (for history, and collaborative editing) to flake which should allow braindump to allow collaborative editing of sections.

The main application is 2300 lines of code, I expect that the size will double in order to connect all the missing bits of the UI. But then everything else will be in shared libraries.

Being in a playfull mood I also implemented a web shape for flake, making possible to insert web pages in koffice documents and in braindump:

The source code is hosted in the Braindump repository. You will need KOffice from trunk to be able to build. It’s already somewhat usuable, and I am hopping that the first stable release can happen with KOffice 2.1 in October.