I’ve had my relapses. I’ve installed AlbumArt from sources, and I use statically compiled Skype. I even installed Amarok once, long long time ago, though used it only for an hour and uninstalled. I try very hard to keep my computers Qt free zone. But one app always slithers its way to my computers no matter what. I was introduced to the application by a Summercode Finland project in 2006, but the love doesn’t go away.

Scribus is a desktop publishing application, a tool for professional page layout creation on Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops. My fiddling with it has been limited to making badges for different conferences and making flyers for promoting a website here and there, but I love it to the extent I install it even when I don’t really want to install anything done with Qt.

I love Scribus a bit like an auntie loves her nieces and nephews, in a distant, non-intrusive way. I know one of the developers as heritage from summer of 2006, and I’ve once in a while given feature suggestions. I just today checked how one of my ideas from spring is doing and apparently it’s been already put in the svn… which… has the version 1.3.5… which is… only… about a year late from publishing?!

After discussing the matter with Riku (a.k.a. Tsoots @ freenode), he told me that apparently all the current developers are quite busy these days. Everyone is happily employed, life treats them good. Although this is nice, it’s a bit sad that the developement and bug crushing has stalled at a point when there’s only 8% of the future release roadmap issues to be solved!

So… If you feel a little tinge on your halo, feel that you could contribute in squashing these blocker bugs or help in any way, poke Tsoots in freenode or toss him an email to riku at scribus.info. He really wouldn’t mind. Rilly rilly.

What tickles me in the svn version is that little birdies tell me the new version would be more easily made to look like native GTK app! ;-)