Archimedes Road map for May 2007

Well,
It was quite obvious I am not ready to maintain a blog yet. But I will keep trying anyway.
At the moment what I have to say is that publishing a new version of Archimedes is a time taking operation. Besides from generating all the releases and zips and uploading everything to the internet both Sourceforge and CodigoLivre and manually having to upload the same files to a couple of other sites, I have to generate about 10 texts that should be published as news on those websites, mails on the releases mailing list, comments on the change log and release infos and a web page to be added to the Archimedes website.
All this work can be very time consuming and gets me very tired and bored. At the moment I have an automated system working with Eclipse PDE and bash scripts that allow me to generate the deploy and the zips and installer and upload all those files to the sourceforge and codigolivre. It basically runs an ant call on eclipse to do the pde work and then works with zip and ftp to generate the files and upload them. Took me about 1 hour to make since I'm a crappy shell scripter but now it's done. So that's the quick part now, but I still have to upload files one by one two sites (codeplex and incubadora) which is a very slow operation and I fall in the old problem: generating all those texts.
As anyone can notice, I am a REALLY crappy english writter and my teachers usually say the same about my french or portuguese writting skills. That can comforts me since I usually generate those texts very fast since I know it will suck anyway but it still takes a lot of time and energy. Especially when I have to translate some parts of it. Anyway... enough complaining.
About Archimedes, the next release should be launched may 26th if nothing goes wrong. This would mean about 1 month between both releases although I would really like it if we had news to publish weekly from now on (meaning next week should have something new to users). The plan for the next release includes:

• Text and Edit text working with Truetype fonts loaded from the system. This should allow users to use the text feature for real, not just like it was before.
• Simplified Dimensions with the hability to reposition the dimension's text. We might not have the time to get this completed since it depends heavily on the text to work decently.
• Layers should be back with all the old features and maybe even some improvements.
• A small "bug" on the snap behaviour with orto on will be fixed. This means snap will overrule orto if the mouse grips on some snap point.
• Moving will be enabled when selecting certain snap points for certain elements.
• Saving and Opening files on the Archimedes format should be back also.
• PDF Export should also be back to allow users to print their work or just show it to someone else.
• Rectangle, Zoom and Pan will also be back but those have no improvements planned yet.

This should be about it. It is not a lot and we might even get some few other features implemented but all will depend on how the team manages to work on the next few weeks. I will try to post a bit more about it as soon as possible.