Surprises, claws and various articles

Dear readers, something nice but unexpected came up recently. As you can imagine, preparations for the release of LibreOffice 5 are keeping many people busy these days. Among the things that need to be found is the choice of collaterals and various elements for communication. It could very well be that readers of this blog will have a nice surprise the day LibreOffice 5 is released!

But that’s only one of the various newsbits I wanted to share with you. The official blog of the Document Foundation has added two very interesting new posts lately. One is about the work taking place at the level of quality assurance for LibreOffice; the other one is a synthetic overview of the technical evolution that made LibreOffice 5 possible. I can only recommend to take some time to go through these two articles, as they are quite enlightening and answer in details about some frequently asked questions, ranging from “why didn’t you fix the bug XYZ707832?” to “has LibreOffice changed much since OpenOffice.org was ever created?“.

Last but not least, I wanted to talk a little bit about Claws Mail. While my email workflow is increasingly relying on Emacs and somewhat more on Evolution, I still use Claws as it is the primary default email client on my (aging) workstation. It turns out that the team behind Claws released a new version after 9 months, a span of time that is a bit of a stretch if you look at the project’s release history. The amount of new features and bugfixes is quite impressive and it is quite a meaningful release. I upgraded and it worked smoothly for me; however it will not curb the current trend in my workflow and as I had explained previously on this blog, what Claws is really missing is a calendar plugin that works with Caldav. So far that has unfortunately not happened. But for anybody who does not rely too much on calendar syncing other than Google Calendar and is not interested in non graphical email clients, you should give Claws a serious try.