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.

We have also decided to experiment with a shorter release schedule for 2.3, which is likely to happen four months after 2.2. This will be made possible with the use of Git, and if we manage to keep the release branch in a releasable state at all time, meaning no tests failures, and that features are only merged when finished.

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…