A Round of Upgrades

Last week I was busy downloading and installing a fairly comprehensive round of upgrades:

• WordPress 2.2: I upgraded all of my WordPress sites to version 2.2. Version 2.2 offers a number of improvements, such as support for widgets and full Atom support; but the changes I cared for the most were the speed improvements.
• KDE 3.5.7: The latest incarnation of the K Desktop Environment in the stable 3.5 series, 3.5.7, was released on May 22, 2007. This is perhaps the last release in the long, stable 3.5.7 series, and the changes are largely bugfixes and minor improvements in Kopete (the instant messenger), KPDF, KMail, and other programs.

  I installed KDE 3.5.7 in both of my workstations (goyeneche at work, and phoenix at home). Overall, 3.5.7 feels a little bit faster, and stable as ever. If you use KDE, this comes as Highly recommended.

• OpenOffice.org 2.2: Yeah, yeah, I know this is old news. After all, OpenOffice.org 2.2 was officially released on March 29, 2007. This release features a big code cleanup, and speed and stability enhancements. There are a number of feature improvements, especially in Impress and Calc (the presentation and spreadsheet modules, respectively).

  All in all, what I like best in this release is the slightly improved speed. I installed in my workstation and in the Win32 partition of goyeneche. This is also recommended.

• Thunderbird 2.0: I upgraded my main office e-mail client, Mozilla Thunderbird, from 1.5.x to 2.0.x. The new Thunderbird 2.0 feels much better, but has the same defects of his browser sibling, Firefox 2.0.x: botched colorscheme, even less settings to configure, forced (and incorrect) guessing of the screen’s dot density, and so on). However, I still think it is a worthy upgrade. What bugs me is a new dialog I see every once in a while: «This folder is being processed…». Go figure.