Eview has served as a practical testbed for SERA encoding, a means to generate Fidel gifs for web pages, also as an abassador of sorts to aid discussion of Fidel script in a practical with computer and software organizations. Experience has shown that for the purpose of this last utility, an elegant, robust, and easily portable script viewer is essential for new implementations of, and development for Fidel. The same truth holds for the availability of a variety of fonts, a fixed address scheme, and generic parser codes, for softwareand system developers to work with.
The emphirical rule of thumb applied here is that Fidel will be imported into greater numbers of computer applications as the work required to do so is minimized. Continuing to develop Eview in a directed manner builds the tools (fonts, code libraries, and encoding) that other organizations will need to work with. That these tools be free, trasportable, simple, and readily extendible is essential to this purpose.
A personal benefit that developing Eview has had for me is that it provides oppurtunities to improve my own programming skills. For this gain alone I will continue to develop it even after such a time as it has out lived its usefullness and been eclipsed by newer methods and software. Starting with release 0.5 the code should be in a more modularized form and be open to simple extensions by other parties.
Periods of maturation and new realizations come along in the course of one's life that may later identify the change of stream life took then, and so marked the beginning and end of a chapter in our lives' story. Within these periods of new experience and changing identity that we pass through we retain the temporal reference to our origin, our age. Discretely known is age but less it tells of character, conflict, and triumph than would the title of the chapter or the content of a page.
The work that becomes Eview at any point in time is given an artificial age in the form of an equally nondescriptive version number. So then, let it be that the episodes in the life of Eview be written to give the life of the work dimension of character.
Eview 0.0 is hacked out of EthioTalk v0.2 by Fisseha at the request of Yacob.
Eview is released to the public and grows with SERA updates, and with improved understanding of font and X11 issues. The original gez.asc font is universalized as BDF.
The basic features for graphical font manipulations are down. The SERA parser goes lex/yacc and X hacks become a widget.
The viewer begins to serve other SERA tools that have arisen and finds new purpose as a GUI for SERA Unix software. The name ``Eview'' is abandoned as the journey to new destiny begins.
Existing features see maturation, the widget core becomes robust. VI like editing is added incrementally. New compatibilities are added as new software arrives. Localizations for Fidel should become feasible. Ethio IRC interface and more web features become possibilities.
The final Eview before the Age of Second Genesis. Features of v0.9 may include Guile codes, localization for IM, Plan 9 compatibility,
The Age of Second Genesis is defined by the introduction of morphological spell checking. The expected sequence for whcih spell checking will be available for is; verbs, nouns, adverbs, other. For languages; Amharic, Tigrigna, and (ultimately) Tigre and Ge'ez.