Following on the hard work we have been doing for the past few months, I released IBus Cangjie 1.0 yesterday evening.

I had been meaning to do that for a while, but kept thinking about a few details to change here and there, and constantly postponed it. Well, you know what they say: "Release early, release often". So after our discussion on Wednesday during the Free Software Hackfest at Dim Sum Labs I figured I'd just call what we have now 1.0 and go from there. We can always improve it in subsequent releases.;-)

All in all, it is a basic implementation of Cangjie and Quick, but I'd like to highlight some of its features here:

• Both Cangjie and Quick are supported in versions 3 and 5
• By default you'll only get Traditional Chinese, but Simplified Chinese input can be enabled in the preferences dialog
• Candidates are presented in the unoptimized but familiar Big 5 ordering, to ease the migration for Microsoft Windows users

I'm very happy about what we achieved. Many people have given me very positive feedback. It seems our strong focus on a great user experience with sensible defaults is paying off.

If you don't want to build the sources, you can get packages for your favourite distribution:

• As usual, Arch Linux's AUR has the stuff a few hours after it's been released
• Ubuntu 13.04 has packages too (not the release yet, it's a very recent development snapshot)
• It's still not available in Fedora (but you can help speeding up the review!), but I just pushed the release on my personal repo

Of course, if you can package it all for another distribution, then let us know!

Of course, this is not the end. We have a long road ahead of us to make it the best way to input Chinese with Cangjie and Quick. You're welcome to climb on the bandwagon. :-)