| KOffice ships v1.5 final beta |
Mar. 14, 2006
 KOffice over the weekend released Beta 2 of KOffice 1.5, the final beta planned for the current product cycle. Thanks to strong user input, the project said, KOffice developers have been able to integrate more than 1,500 improvements over the first beta.
The project team is being a bit more deliberate about this important 1.5 release. The dates for the first release candidate and final stable versions have been pushed out by about a month; the first final v1.5 RC1 is now set for March 27 availability, with the final version of KOffice 1.5 now set for an April 11 release, the team said.
KOffice developers invite the user community for another round of testing of KOffice 1.5 Beta 2.
Principal improvement in this new beta include the following, according to the project web page: - OASIS OpenDocument support in KChart, OpenDocument improvements in KWord, KSpread, KPresenter, and Karbon -- KChart now has a new charting engine and also adds support for loading and saving charts in the OASIS OpenDocument file standard. KPresenter, KSpread, KWord and Karbon14 all have received improvements and fixes to their OpenDocument code, the project said.
- Performance and stability improvements in Krita -- Krita, KOffice's painting and image editing application, received more than 500 fixes and is now much more stable and polished, the team said. Developers improved the speed of loading and rendering large and complex images, painting gradients, and previewing filter effects, KOffice said.
- KPlato user interface, manual and recalculation -- KPlato has been improved "beyond recognition," the project said, through the immense improvement of the recalculation engine. Not only that, but KPlato now has a complete manual, and work has continued on improving KPlato's user interface. KPlato is now ready for intensive user testing, the project added.
KOffice 1.5 Beta 2 includes the following applications: - a frame-based, full-featured word processor (KWord)
- spreadsheet application (KSpread)
- presentation application (KPresenter)
- flowchart application (Kivio)
- integrated database application (Kexi)
- new project management application (KPlato)
- pixel based image editing and paint application (Krita)
- vector-drawing application (Karbon14)
Additionally, KOffice includes these embeddable objects: - business quality reporting software (Kugar)
- full-featured charting engine (KChart)
- mathematical formula handling (KFormula)
KOffice also includes a built-in thesaurus (KThesaurus) and support for many different file formats. A detailed list of improvements in Beta 2 can be found in the project's announcement.
A number of Linux/Unix vendors have provided binary packages of KOffice 1.5 beta2 for some versions of their distributions, the project said, and in other cases community volunteers have done so. Some of these binary packages are available for free download from KDE's http and ftp mirrors. Additional binary packages, as well as updates to the packages now available, may become available over the coming weeks.
The latest stable version of KOffice (1.4.2) is available for download, here.
Related Stories:
(Click here for further information)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
