Katoob, the baby has a new father.

This post has a bit of my history and emotions. It can be skipped!

The summary is: Katoob has a new maintainer.

...

Yes, a long time.

Back in 2002, Gtk 2.x was just released. Efforts were spent porting, rewriting and redesigning parts of GNOME. The aim was GNOME 2.0 and later on 2.x

Previously, we had Gtk which did not support Arabic at all.
At that time, the only usable Arabic capable GUI editor was a closed source one, Axmedit. I was also trying to learn programming and write something useful. Katoob was born at that time. The aim ? provide the Arabic user with something usable and the secret agenda was me learning Gtk and get my hands dirty with C. Not having enough skills to contribute to something as large as GNOME.

It wasn't called Katoob (Which means something like an exaggerated writer in arabic). Me and Alaa wanted to call it gDhad (G is for GNU, Gtk, GPL, ... and Dhad is the letter. Arabic is known as the language of "dhad") but a miscommunication lead to that name.

Arabeyes hosted the project in the beginning. The problem was it was released after the first version of GNOME2. I missed a contest.

The problem is that it was already used by a few of my friends. A lot of testing has been done in the beginning. I still remember feeding it various media files as well as random garbage to see what will happen.

Years later, the whole thing grew into a pile of spaghetti code. It was the time for me to start learning C++. What else can I use to learn it ?
Then 0.5 was born. A bit cleaner, C++, Gtkmm and moving it to my own place. It even survived my migration from CVS to SVN last year.

It also started to be used by more people.

As I become busier with work and as my interests have started to change, I found myself incapable of maintaining it. It's actually a motivation problem more than anything else. I'm not involved into Arabization issues (I was never involved but people claimed I was ;-)) and I wasn't getting enough testing.

I don't use it a lot anymore. Everything supports Arabic now. I don't think we need that project anymore.
I can also use Emacs to read and write Arabic

Now, Fred Morcos decided to step up and maintain it. Good luck to him. At least I found someone to take care of the baby.