Project Overview

About Sophie

• Sophie is an all purpose tool for dealing with media. It allows users to easily create books that can contain any sort of media on hand – text, images, sounds, videos, animations. Sophie does for media what a physical book does for text and images: with Sophie, authors can create multimedia books. Sophie allows the easy construction of documents that are designed to live on a network and use multimedia and time in ways that are currently difficult, if not impossible. Sophie transforms the way people go about reading and writing in screen-based environments. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions.
  You can get Sophie Author 1.0 from ​here and Sophie Reader 1.0 from ​here.
  The goal of Sophie2 is to adapt the good ideas of Sophie, remove the bugs and combine them with a better performance.
  You might want to read more about the history of Sophie2 or about Astea solutions. If so, click here.

• License
  Sophie2 uses Educational Community License, Version 2.0, which is a modified Apache 2.0 one. Its full text is placed in the License section.

• Requirements
  Sophie2 runs on Windows, Lunux and MacOS. Since it is written in Java, in order to run the platform independent libraries, you need Java installed. The hardware requirements can not be precise until a more advanced phase of development. What is known for now is written in the Requirements section of the Wiki.

• Development
  This page is not intended to contain information about developing Sophie2. Most of the important documents are located in Developers' Home. However, the Development Overview page might be what you need. It contains a brief tutorial for getting into the development of Sophie2.

Schedule

Sophie2's development process will take about 1 year, starting from October 2008. This period is split into 12 shorter ones, called "iterations" (each iteration lasts about a month). During this time, more than 1500 tasks are going to be done. Every task has 3 major phases: analysis (defining what will be done), design (defining how to be done) and implementation (the actual work). The release schedule of the project is defined as follows:

• pre - iterations 1-5. At the end of this phase, the product must have stable internal architecture (this includes mainly the plugin decomposition).
• alpha - iterations 6-8. Massive changes are expected here, but only external ones. After the end of the alphas, we will stop adding new features.
• beta - iterations 9-11. All the features included until this period will be finished here. Most of the bugfixing will be done, too.
• final - iteration 12. Final bugfixing.
  

This methodology, as you see, is quite similar to ​SCRUM.
If you are interested in the current progress of the project, go to the roadmap.

Product organization

The Sophie2 platform consists of a set of bundles with specific functionality. Since it is a complete desktop publishing solution, some users may not need all of its features (for example, you do not need the Sophie2 server in order to read a book). This issue is resolved by the edition structure of Sophie: every edition is a stand-alone subset of these bundles. Sophie2 has 3 editions: Author, Reader and Server (their names are determinative for the functionality they provide).

User guide

User help / user guide for Sophie2 are not finished yet. However, there is a user guide for Sophie 1.0 at ​http://opensophie.org/en/documentation/userguide. From the user point of view, it has similar general concepts.

Contact

Should this section be here? If yes, what to provide..

Links

Sophie Wishlist contains the functionalities, which Sophie users would like to be available in Sophie2. So, these are the issues we work on, besides the ones, mentioned at the begining of the overview.

​Frequently Asked Questions. Here is a list of questions and their answers, divided in categories.

​Forum. Plese, read the FAQ before posting questions in the forum.

​Blog.

​http://asteasolutions.net. This is the official site of Astea Solutions AD.