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KDE Announces the Calligra Suite
Inge Wallin
Inge Wallin
The KDE community today announces the start of the Calligra Suite project, a continuation of the KOffice project. The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications. With a new name for the Suite and new names for the productivity applications, the Calligra community welcomes a new stage in the development of free productivity and creativity applications for desktop and mobile devices.
Calligra Overview
The Calligra Suite contains the following applications: Productivity applications:
Words Word processor; new, but evolved from KWord
Tables Spreadsheet program, previously known as KSpread
Stage Presentation program, previously known as KPresenter
Flow Flowchart program, previously known as Kivio
Kexi Database application like Microsoft Access Management applications:
Plan Project management, previously known as KPlato
Graphics applications:
Krita Drawing application for multi-layered pixel-based images
Karbon Drawing application for multi-layered vector images
The Calligra Suite contains the following applications: Productivity applications:
Words Word processor; new, but evolved from KWord
Tables Spreadsheet program, previously known as KSpread
Stage Presentation program, previously known as KPresenter
Flow Flowchart program, previously known as Kivio
Kexi Database application like Microsoft Access Management applications:
Plan Project management, previously known as KPlato
Graphics applications:
Krita Drawing application for multi-layered pixel-based images
Karbon Drawing application for multi-layered vector images
More applications will be added as we get more contributors. Currently all applications except Calligra Words will be maintained by their respective KOffice developers.
The Calligra Suite introduces the Calligra Office Engine which makes it easy for developers to create new user experiences, target new platforms and create specialized versions for new kinds of users. Currently, there are two main user experiences: the desktop UI with the applications mentioned above, and FreOffice which is the only free mobile office suite in existence.
Calligra and Users
It is a goal of the Project that users will see only positive changes. In addition to new names, we expect that the move to Git will make development speedier and higher quality. New user experiences will be added and the existing ones will see more usability work.
The community will release KOffice version 2.3 as planned in approximately 2 weeks, and will maintain it with bugfix releases during the KOffice 2.3 life cycle. Starting with version 2.4, we will continue development of most of the applications under the new names.
Calligra and the Past
Nearly everyone in the KOffice community has joined together to make this move. Leaving the past behind us, we are excited at this opportunity to make our software more innovative and widely-used. At the same time that the Calligra project is created, we will move from Subversion to Git, making it an even better platform for innovation in the free office space.
Calligra and KDE
KDE is one of the largest open source communities in the world. KDE software is one of only two projects that has reached a million commits in their repositories (the other is Apache).
KDE publishes several workspaces (Plasma Desktop, Plasma Netbook and soon Plasma Mobile), a development platform, and many sets of applications like the KDE EDU applications, KDE games, Amarok and K3b.
KOffice has always been part of the larger KDE community. Calligra will continue to use the KDE infrastructure such as bugtracker, forums, and community wikis. The Calligra team is very much a part of the KDE community and proud of it. The applications we develop will continue to be KDE offerings.
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