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Re: Zim project update & donations

 

Hi Jaap,

thank you for taking the time to share your plans, thanks for the good news, and thanks for finding the time to work on Zim despite all the juggling.

Couple of points:

1 - Zim is my work horse since years now, and I would like to contribute, to confirm that yes, we count on it and on you. Where I can find the donations page?

2 - Counting both document and attachments, my Zim wiki holds some 60K objects or 150GB of data. I don't know if this is a lot, and I am just driving the tool outside its sweet spot, but in my experience the search facility simply can't cope with notebooks like this. Hopefully the fix to avoid indexing text file attachments will help, but in my opinion improving search performance should be more than just nice to have. No push, just my own experience.

Thanks again, and stay safe!
mario

On 12/29/20 8:46 PM, Jaap Karssenberg wrote:
Dear all,

In this mail I would like to share a project update and an update on donations for the Zim project.

As those who are using the development snapshots will be aware, there is quite some work lined up already for a new release. Key features will be UI changes towards a more modern "Gnome 3" look (for better or worse - tastes differ), the ability to edit pages in separate windows, and a fix for not indexing text file attachments as pages (which is long overdue). In the mean time I try to do reasonable frequent "point releases" of the main branch to fix critical bugs. I expect at least one more point release before I can release the features waiting in the development branch. Last few months I had good progress, but unfortunately the Netherlands is in lockdown again due to COVID-19 over the Christmas holiday, so the coming weeks or longer I will be juggling family and work and expect little time left for Zim. But I will manage to do at least critical bug fixes. As a long term plan I now use a list of things I would want to see in a "1.0 release" for Zim. The list is available in the GitHub wiki here <https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/wiki/Planning>.

I've also been thinking what to do with the donations that come in. First of all I would like to stress I really appreciate all the donations that come in - I always experience them as a token of gratitude and a direct message that people out there are actually using my application. They also make me feel responsible: first of all to make sure Zim is worthy of those donations, but secondly also in putting the money to good use. At the moment they amount between 500 - 1000 euros per year. Since this is not enough to hire commercial help, I myself do any work on Zim for free, and expenses are limited to webhosting, I don't have a real good use for this money at the moment. Therefore as of this year I will donate any donations beyond a small buffer to the International Red Cross (via the dutch national branch). I'm convinced they will be able to put it to good use and are sufficiently politically neutral. I also believe this will give me personally a better incentive to keep working on Zim, knowing it contributes not only to good open software but also in a small way to more pressing needs.

I hope all of you are safe out there and wish you all the best for 2021!

Kind regards,

Jaap Karssenberg


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