The new asymetric-quadtree code is shaping up nicely. Gnumeric can now load a sheet with 900,000 cells within acceptable performace bounds. We still use almost 4x as much memory as MS excel (tm) but that should improve as some of the other new toys I'm planning come on line. Merged cell support is mostly complete. I've enabled it by default now. Kick it around if possible.

The very prolific Zbigniew Chyla has joined the team and is generating a steady stream of patches to improve translation support. His latest work greatly extends the management of plugins. I hope to get the patch in for the next release. Jon Kare has returned as is pumping some nice cleanups to the UI and file I/O routines. My long standing dream of a GUI-less gnumeric engine is getting closer and closer to reality. With a bit of luck he may even start work on supporting frozen panes ! Almer is still hard at work on the stf.

We've been pretty lucky with 0.61, no really obvious boneheaded problems have surfaced. That is giving us some time before 0.62 comes out. I'll tentatively aim for Feb 1 as a good date to get things stabilized. What we really need is for distributions to start shipping 0.61, the waterfall of bug reports from old (ancient) versions is enormous. I suppose that means that people are actually using Gnumeric.