I've just noticed that abiword has been updated in diablo extras-devel for the first time in almost a year. The previous version was 2.6.4, the new one is 2.7.3. It looks like the new version is being worked on by Hubert Figuiere, see http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/, who is part of the Abiword team. See the announcement at http://abisource.com/release-notes/2.7.3.phtml. Nice to see that this is being 'officially' worked on by the Abiword team, rather than being ported by someone unrelated.

Obviously it's still only in extras-devel, not extras, so should be treated as a beta. I've given it a quick go, and it does look like the interface has been revamped a bit. For example, the toolbar only has one row rather than two, and the number of menu items seems to be less. It's hard to compare them side-by-side, of course.

Hopefully this version will be more stable and not crash as much as the old one did. Maybe if this works well, they can be persuaded to work on Gnumeric too, which could do with a bit of love, although at least the current version of that doesn't crash.