With the conclusion of our fourth iteration comes the summary of what have been done. As scheduled we've launched our second release which covers all functionalities that we've promised. We manged to catch up with the analyses from previous iterations and the next one. The new funtionalities included in the release from February 13 are:

• Selecting multiple page objects
• Page object alignment
• Frame bounding properties, for example margins
• Basic audio and video support
• Undo manager
  • Undo/Redo of the insert frame action now works without exeptions.
  • Undo/Redo of the move frame action works.
  • Create book action now is not undoable.
  • Undo/Redo of page resize action now works.
  • The book does not resize with it's title change action anymore.
  • There is now change when selecting the current frame anymore.
  • Undo/Redo text editing in text frames now works.
  • Fixed the "Redo" item in the edit menu to show "Can't redo" when the user can not redo an action.)
• Improved Halos and HUDs
• Initial plugin support
• Build Server

Also numerous bugfixes were done. Other things that worth mentioning are the branding discussions with Robert Abbot from Shift Global and the fact that we analized all tasks till iteration 04. The results of the retrospection, as usual are separated in the following three categories:
What went well:

• Improved overall quality - most of this iteration we were working on refactoring and improving the existing logic
• Functionality - the release team managed to implement many new funtionalities that cover all requirements for the current release
• Analyses - we managed to catch up with the analyses for the previous and next iterations.
• Discussions - we've done a lot of useful discussions concerning the design and the overall ideas of the project. Videos of these discussions are available here.
• HR and recruitment - we've improved the procedure for recruiting new team members
• Improved Site - we refactored our old website and now it is more attractive and useful

What could be better:

• Some team members weren't available - this was due to exam and dissertation commitments at the university
• Few tasks of this iteration were done - we worked on few tasks from fourth iteration
• Discipline and process - it is improving, but it still could be better
• Better documented discussions - we need to document better our discussions, this way it's going to be easier for the remote people to be productive
• More tested tasks - not enough tasks were tested during this iteration.

How to improve:

• Spread global vision - more people need to understand the fundamental ideas behind the project, and have overall view of the entire picture
• Discuss - the people need to ask themselves the questions "Why?" and "How?" that's why we need to discuss even more
• Specifications explanations - something like a specification skeleton needs to be created
• Don't accept - we must fix the bad code, not to reproduce it

Best regards from the Sophie team!

As announced earlier a wiki page with links to useful videos is now available at http://sophie2.org/trac/wiki/Videos .
We hope that you will find answers to most of your questions about the project there.