LibreOffice: release candidate 3 available for download

LibreOffice is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you 6 feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. Support and documentation is free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers.

Libre office release candidate 3 is available for dowload.This version comes with a lot of improvements over its previous RC version.

The general features of the new release are:

• Load and Save ODF documents in flat XML to make external XSLT processing easier
• Make License Information accessible via the Help menu
• Made on-line Help available on-line, via the WikiHelp
• Added "Experimental" mode, to allow users to test out as-yet-unfinished features
• Bundled Linux "Libertine G" and Linux "Biolinum G" fonts
• Added the LibreColors to the palette
• Implement import of alpha channel for RGBA .tiffs
• Show all appropiate formats by default on "Save As
• Use radio buttons widgets to clarify complex menu option intentions
• Add option to enable saving of documents with non-visible changes
• Added Quickstarter for Unix builds (enabled only in distro builds)
• Fix synthetic small caps resizing factor to improve look and interoperability

More  new features in the version 3.3 are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/new-features-and-fixes/. The Release Candidate 3 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.The release candidate is not intended for production use.

Zim-A Desktop Wiki

 Many people who search the web for a particular topic on web find it difficult to organize the small peices of information they encounter. For example, if you are a working on a project and you depend on searching on web for information about the project. You come across small pieces of information from various websites and want to note them in a simple, easy to mangage and editable way. Word processing tools like word MS word or Open Office Writer is not an approprite tool for this kind of work. Although there are small note taking appletes like StickyNotes, there are good only to note small information bits like phone number,email,address,etc,. One solution to this kind of problem is the Zim- A desktop wiki.

Zim brings the concept of a wiki to your desktop. Store information, link pages and edit with WYSISYG markup. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a non-existing page. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments.
This tool can be used to keep track of TODO lists or ideas, to take notes during a meeting or to draft any other kind of text (blog entries, important mails, etc.). Unlike word processing tools like Writer,zim has a clean interface without any clutter of additional menus.

you can also embedd images,takes screen shots using the plugins,insert special characters,text from a file,attach a file.
Each notebook consists of a set of pages. Each page can contain, text, images and links to other pages. The pages can be arranged in a hierarchical index.