Well, that is the plan. At the end of this month new development in the user interface will stop and the next months will be used to test release candidates and beta versions. Here’s some of the features that will be added in 2.0 and how to get a preview download.
The current development, unstable, for-testing-purposes-only version can be downloaded now.
A complete list of features is available online at the main OpenOffice.org site. However, I’d like to summairze a few features I view as being the most important in this release to bring it up to speed:
- New toolbar concept and design – The OpenOffice.org 2.0 toolbars will provide a lot of usability enhancements which allow an easier customization of the toolbars.
- New file format names due to adoption of OASIS Open Office XML format – I’m not sure if the big news is the extension changing or the format evolution 😉
- Automatic Java Configuration, Java Options Panel – says it all
- Native installers! – planned for Windows, Linux and Sun, among others
- A Format Paintbrush – finally!
- and of course, e-mail merge part of the full mail merge rewrite
I think the redesign of the toolbars will be the most important change in the 2.0 release. IMHO it’s one of the thinks that keeps people from completely switching to OOo. Even advanced OOo users have to admit, the toolbars are a mess…