Project Overview

About Sophie

• Sophie is an advanced tool for authoring, reading, and publishing electronic books. It allows users to easily create books that can contain any type of media they have on hand – text, images, sounds, videos, and 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 and Sophie Reader 1.0 from ​here.
  The goal of Sophie 2 is to take the good aspects of the existing Sophie and optimize them and to add features as well as to remove others based on user feedback.
  You might want to read more about the history of Sophie2 or about ​Astea Solutions. If so, click here.

• License
  

Copyright 2008, The University of Southern California. Licensed under the Educational Community License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this code except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at ​http://www.osedu.org/licenses/ECL-2.0. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

• 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
  Sophie2 is being developed in several layers: Platform, Core, Base, Main, Extra, Community server, Sophie2 server, End product and Supporting artifacts. Explanations about them, as well as a brief tutorial for new developers, is in Development Overview. Most of the other important development documents are located in Developers' Home.
  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.
  

• Structure. 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).

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 about 1 month long). During this time, more than 1500 tasks are going to be done. The methodology we use for performing these tasks is similar to ​SCRUM. 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.
  

If you are interested in the current progress of the project, go to the roadmap.

Help and Support

This section should provide answers to your questions about the project (or at least a place to post them). The blog can also give you an overview of our progress.

• 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.

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

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

• You can also visit the ​Sophie 2.0 Blog.