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testing luminocity:

gnome cvs docs
module name luminocity - last sentance of the article

myren

It's a nice idea, for sure. I just hope it fares a little bit better in reality than Seth Nickell's last grandiose idea. I'd like to see some of these idea implemented and not just discussed. Of course, I've contributed nothing to the success of these projects either -- and Seth's ideas are great. I'm not saying that I'm so much better than him, just that I hope some reality can emerge from this grandiose idea so that Linux doesn't develop the same reputation for vaporware as does Duke Nukem.

Evolution (also by Novell) is an Outlook client replacement that runs on UNIX and is being ported to Win32.

Hula is just another mail/groupware server from Novell (The others are Open Xchange and GroupWise). And CalDev is just another format, to mix up things, when most open source groupware and mail servers and clients were converging to use GroupDav. But why is GNOME promoting this server and not the other open source servers?

Check out Planet GNOME and Footnotes and see for yourself how GNOME is being used as a tool to market software that has no direct relationship with GNOME, and does not use GNOME technology. So using GNOME to promote Mono and Evolution is one thing, but as a marketing plataform for unrelated software is another. Where does it end?

Apparently, Evolution can give you a woody, but if you've got that sign and she's still talking to her friend. Dude, seriously, she just not that in to you.

Please be a good OSS denizen and file bugs at BGO or (preferably) SourceForge. Some of what you mention is possible to do within the GTK theming/settings framework, and some is simply out of the theme-writer's hands presently.

If people identify and file problems, I know what's bugging them and can work to resolve them. But I won't track down and resolve issues on newsgroups and message boards like Slashdot.

Finally, GTK-Wimp's look will "fall back" fairly nicely on Win32 systems that don't have UXTheme installed (2k,9x) or on XP/2k3 where it isn't running. In those cases, it's basically the Raleigh theme engine with Win32's color palette and system settings in effect.

Best,
Dom Lachowicz, GTK-Wimp maintainer

Here is Miguel's answer to GNOME becomig depentdant on MONO: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002- February/msg00031.html

As for the applications you mention, they're all great but for one reason or another I do end up preferring some available on the GNU/Linux desktop.

Evolution has both an address book and mail. It also has a calendar and these days you see the Evolution calendar events even in the panel's calendar, which I think is great and a good example of the GNOME desktop integration. Evolution is truly a great mail client although it really has even more stuff than I need.

For chat I like Psi which is a great Jabber client available for whatever platform I choose. I may try iChat when it supports Jabber (next OS X I hear) and Psi doesn't offer that kind of integration but it still is the best IM client I've used and currently iChat isn't an option.

AmaroK kicks iTunes' ass in my not so humble opinion. It has many features not found in iTunes which I'm not so impressed with. Also, Ogg Vorbis really is an issue for me as I've got a substantial collection of self-ripped vorbis files. Each and every Linux player support them and so does for example WinAmp.

As for the rest, iPhoto is pretty nice and I can't name anything superior but I'm not that heartbroken from not having it. I can't talk much about iMovie but it seems a pretty good entry-level video editing app, certainly better than Windows movie maker. The stuff that's available for Linux tends to be more pro-oriented in that are I guess (same goes for Garageband). What's so good about iDVD? xine/mplayer/ogle/... do more and work well as DVD players.

Linux distributions vary a lot, if you select a good one, you won't be overwhelmed with choice initially but will be able to get to the options if you want to test the large amount available. Ubuntu, Fedora and SuSe are my recent favourites here. I don't think so much of the OS X desktop and feel your 1979 comment is a flamebait. Some things work better in GNU/Linux, others are still lagging behind it, but nothing's perfect.

Although, being Slashdot, I feel compelled to mention Gnome's Bitstream Vera fonts. Bitstream Vera Sans looks great on a web page, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is a good choice to code with. You can get them as TTF files at the following URL: http://www.gnome.org/fonts/

No need for them to re-invent the wheel, they can just use Gnumeric Oh yeah, and the stats functions on gnumeric get fixed if bugs are found, unlike the 10 year outstanding bugs in excel ;)
(When MS 'fixed' the rand() function, to my knowlege the only one they bothered even trying to fix, random numbers between 0 and 1 started coming out negative.)

Huh? Ohh.....you don't mean Glade, you mean Glade...I get ya ;)

It's nice to have an exhaustive list of changes, but i'd prefer having one list reporting the usability improvements, as those provided with GNOME new releases.

A simple list of new features doesn't give as much information as a report of the key changes that will affect the whole desktop "experience".

Slashdot is not the place for criticism (constructive or otherwise). If you have clear ideas what can be improved without breaking what is there and works hit bugzilla .

There are plenty of RADs. But first you need to decide on a programming language.

Ada:
Glade

BASIC:
Gambas
Phoenix
Rapid-Q

C:
Glade

C++ (why?):
Glade
Kylix
QT Designer

Pascal:
Kylix
Lazarus

Python:
python-glade

Two points:

(1) Why is this article in the "BSD" section?

(2) Please use Gnome instead of KDE if you are able. By using KDE, you are supporting a commercial company, Trolltech. KDE is built on their commercial (as in: non-free) Qt API that costs $3000 per seat for developers if you want to write for more than one platform.

Yes kids, cross-platform development using Qt is twenty times more expensive than the total software cost of developing for Microsoft Windows and Linux using other standard toolkits[1]. And please don't say "but you're paying for support" for Qt - it's nothing more than a windowing library. If you need to pay for support, it is broken.

[1] Assuming Windows XP Pro OEM costs $150 and you use the freely available development tools and a licence-free cross platform API such as the platform-neutral wxWidgets or Gnome's cross-platform toolkit, GTK - you will never have any expense other than for the operating system on which you develop.

What you describe is low-level GUI management, the kind of what is solved by following some GUI guidelines (like GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, for instance). It's certainly the kind of details that a programmer should know, but it is not enough to build a decent interface.

The core of a really good application is goal oriented software design (also called user oriented design). Before thinking about widgets and gadgets and frame layout, you should start by defining what the application must do and how to do it - and the key to this is to build a prototype and observing real users using it.

That's it, interface design must be an iterative process in which real user problems are observed in real use, and then fixing it with a new design for the real task that the user is trying to accomplish.

you didn't understand it.

The LGPL is very clear and very basic. You can keep you code closed and you do not have to license your code under the LGPL. The only requirement is if you make changes to the _original_ LGPLed code/library, than you have to release those changes. For example, you write you application in C/GTK+. GTK+ is an LGPLed GUI tool-kit. You do not have to release _your_ source code. You do not have to release _your_ source code under the LGPL. The only time you would have to release _any_ code is if you went and actually changed the GTK+ tool-kit itself, which is not someting normally done, since you just _use_ the tool-kit. This is no different than under MS Windows. Do you think Microsoft would allow you to modify their Win32 API and distribute those modifications as your own? Nope.

However, if you try to tell me that gnome is a widget set, I will proceed to ignore you for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Gnome is a desktop environment. Gnome does have its _own_ API on top of GTK+ which is the tool-kit for Gnome. Here is a link to the GNOME Developer Platform Libraries.

GLib - GLib provides functionality which makes C more pleasant and convenient to use. It is used throughout the libraries of GTK+ and GNOME as well as in GNOME programs.

GObject - GObject provides the object system used for Pango and GTK+.

Atk - Atk - The ATK library provides a set of interfaces for accessibility. By supporting the ATK interfaces, an application or toolkit can be used such as tools such as screen readers, magnifiers, and alternative input devices.

At-spi - The AT-SPI library provides interfaces which are used by accessibility technologies. The documentation above describes the C bindings for these interfaces.

Gail - The GAIL library provides accessibility support for GTK+ and libgnomecanvas by implementing AtkObjects for widgets in these libraries.

Pango - Pango provides font and text handling that is used for GDK and GTK+.

GdkPixbuf - GdkPixbuf is a library for image loading and manipulation. The GdkPixbuf documentation contains both the programmer's guide and the API reference.

GDK - An intermediate layer which isolates GTK+ from the details of the windowing system.

GTK+ - The GTK+ widgets.

libXML - Powerful and feature complete XML handling library.

libxslt - The XSLT C library developed for the Gnome project. XSLT itself is a an XML language to define transformation for XML. Libxslt is based on libxml2.

libglade - The Libglade library gives applications the ability to load user interfaces from XML files at runtime. These interface files can be created with the GLADE user interface builder. Libglade is also capable of automatically connecting handlers to the signals defined in the interface file.

libGnome - Library containing extra widgets to let your GNOME applications shine.

libGnomeui - Library containing extra widgets to let your GNOME applications really shine.

GNOME-vfs - Library for letting applications seamlessly access remote and local files.

GConf - GConf is a process-transparent configuration database with a model-view-controller architecture and a number of other spiffy features. Like the Registry, but fixed up and on steroids.

Libgnomecanvas - The libgnomecanvas library provides a widget for creating interactive structured graphics in object-oriented fashion.

Libart - Libart functions - Libart handles the drawing capabilities in GNOME. All complex rendering is handled here.

ORBit - ORBit is an implementation of the C CORBA specification. It is among the fastest CORBA ORB's available.

Bonobo-activation - Bonobo-activation allows you to browse the available CORBA servers on your system (running or not). It keeps track of the running servers so that if you ask for a s

His wife was trying to save a 2.2MB for a 2 page Word document on a floppy disk. Plain text, default font, left aligned. There was one email address, underlined. After 17 minutes of searching, he found a way to turn off this email address highlight off. The document was then saved at 800KB.

We can't make full release notes for every single point release. And when I say release notes, I mean these:

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.2/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.4/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.8/notes/


These take a fair amount of time to prepare. Now if you want a quick overview of what's changed since the last point release, the NEWS entries of all the modules are aggregated together for quick reading:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/desktop/2.9/2.9.90/ NEWS

We can't make full release notes for every single point release. And when I say release notes, I mean these:

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.2/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.4/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.8/notes/


These take a fair amount of time to prepare. Now if you want a quick overview of what's changed since the last point release, the NEWS entries of all the modules are aggregated together for quick reading:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/desktop/2.9/2.9.90/ NEWS

We can't make full release notes for every single point release. And when I say release notes, I mean these:

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.2/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.4/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.8/notes/


These take a fair amount of time to prepare. Now if you want a quick overview of what's changed since the last point release, the NEWS entries of all the modules are aggregated together for quick reading:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/desktop/2.9/2.9.90/ NEWS

We can't make full release notes for every single point release. And when I say release notes, I mean these:

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.2/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.4/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.8/notes/


These take a fair amount of time to prepare. Now if you want a quick overview of what's changed since the last point release, the NEWS entries of all the modules are aggregated together for quick reading:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/desktop/2.9/2.9.90/ NEWS

We can't make full release notes for every single point release. And when I say release notes, I mean these:

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.2/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.4/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.8/notes/


These take a fair amount of time to prepare. Now if you want a quick overview of what's changed since the last point release, the NEWS entries of all the modules are aggregated together for quick reading:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/desktop/2.9/2.9.90/ NEWS

It's a beta release. Beta means people not on the development team are trying to use it. And a release ought to come with release notes, to be usable by those of us not on this team.

There:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list /2005-February/msg00000.html

Announced the 4th. Will you stop whining now?

Which is ultimately the key to success of any software - Windows triumphs solely on the quality of these docs, rather than any quality of the SW itself. If we can do better, we can turn the tables.

Windows triumphs because they were early and smart enough in the industry to stablish a monopoly quite hard to break.

If you're gonna tell me that Windows' user docs ("we found no answer, ask tech support") are "quality", please don't. I'll laugh in front of you till I puke.

They probably should expose the ctrl+l somewhere, but your complaints sound pretty specific, why not submit two bugs

Bug 136541 Opened March 2004. They tend to worry about accessability and exposing functionality through APIs rather than actual usability.

(and maybe tone down the rhetoric... two minor complaints for a rather function-full component is hardly grounds declaring incompetence)?

Either everyone in the GUI world is wrong except for GNOME, or just GNOME is wrong. You take your pick.

One thing I noticed as I used Linux desktop environments is letter spacing (and related typographical settings in font rendering.) OS X superior looks have very much to do with the way it renders fonts, IMO, even when compared to Windows. Variables such as spacing or kern must be controlled at the OS level on the Mac, as they're often editable via the system-wide font selection tool.

I've only had very minor experiences with Gnome or KDE, but I remember the irregular, large letter spacing as the one thing that prevented the GUI from looking really polished and elegant to me.

I've seen the same thing when running X apps in OS X, both through Apple's and Xfree.org server, so I guess it's more of a X problem. This page shows a good example of lousy spacing, although IANA professional typemeister, so I can't really tell how much of this is due to the particular font used.

In any case, I see a lot of talk about system-wide anti-aliasing, vector graphics etc... in Linux but very little about improving these typographical "variables" rendering.

It's not my intention to knock Gnome, but I think it future releases could have a more all-ecncompassing set of system configuration tools, like KDE has.

Gnome System Tools are already included since gnome 2.8. Improvements for next versions are being discussed.

Hey, I just thought, it would be nice if people criticized software they actually used.

It's not my intention to knock Gnome, but I think it future releases could have a more all-ecncompassing set of system configuration tools, like KDE has.

Gnome System Tools are already included since gnome 2.8. Improvements for next versions are being discussed.

Hey, I just thought, it would be nice if people criticized software they actually used.

This is called marketing.

Screenshots are excellent as a marketing tool, especially when a new release is nicely incremental but adds little in way of actual features. And bug fixes are just plain not sexy.

Screenshots are good. Show those screenshots around. That's how you'll attract more users to the GNOME camp!

And for those curious, it's more pronounced in these shots: http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-10/.

Hell, look at this--http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow. php?release=234&slide=32. See the word "IDE?" The D characters have uneven line widths on their curves. They thicken right at the diagonal parts.

More accurate screenshots here.

I like the shadow effect, but maybe that is here now, and I don't know it?

Here are some better screenshots of apps in this release with descriptions. Much better than the 640x480 screenshots linked to in the article.

Is it me, or does this look worse than the stock ubuntu install Gnome?

If you look through the screenshots, it is an Ubuntu install, and has a number of the Ubuntu customisations already, so it's not even very representative of what the general GNOME 2.10 user is going to get. All up, the screenshots aren't worth your time, head here to see what changes GNOME 2.10 has.

Jedidiah.

A changelog be more useful than crappy screenshots...

Indeed, this story seems to be a waste of time. If you want screenshots that actually show you what you're getting that's different, look here. It's old news (it's been up for some time), but it gives you a far better idea of what you're getting.

Jedidiah.

Would be nice with some comments and screenshots showing whats new. I really couldnt tell any difference from the previous releases (could have tried hrder but I m lazy:) Also that theme muust be the most ugly one they could have choosen...

I think this is what you're looking for - of course this one is "old news" having been posted on Slashdot previously. It does a lot better of job of actually showing you what to expect in GNOME 2.10 than the selection of Ubuntu screenshots from OSDir though.

Jedidiah.

I've been playing with SVG in linux for the last couple of weeks. And I came across a couple of fun relevant projects:
Gnome: supports scalable SVG icons, fun!!!
Inkscape: is an open source SVG editor that has recently added Text-on-a-Path to its feature list
librsvg: lib for adding SVG support to apps. Also, has a command line SVG rasterizer (although inkscape can do that also)

Ummmm, haven't you seen Evolution? Or is there some other reason that's not what you're looking for?

Also, if you wanted something interactive, try Dia.

If I spend all day using Firefox, (...) For instance, applications written for X11 usually feel much different than native Gnome apps.

Apple's point, their key design idea, is that contextual menus should always be optional. There should, ideally, never be a feature that's in the right-click menu that's not accessible other places.

Gee, that seems to be a Microsoft idea, too, although they don't say that context menu items should always be available as menu bar items:

Avoid using a shortcut menu as the only way for a user to access a particular operation. At the same time, the items on a shortcut menu need not be limited only to commands that are included in drop-down menus. For example, you can include frequently used commands typically found in a secondary window, such as a specific property setting.

as Apple does in the Apple Human Interface Guidelines:

ever provide a contextual menu command that is not also accessible through the menu bar. Commands with keyboard shortcuts should be noted in the menu bar menu but not in the contextual menu. Use submenus with caution and keep them to one level.

The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines are somewhat less emphatic:

Since the user may not be aware of their presence, do not provide functions that are only accessible from popup menus unless you are confident that your target users will know how to use popup menus.

The KDE User Interface Guidelines don't have anything obvious on context/popup/shortcut menus.

Apple's point, their key design idea, is that contextual menus should always be optional. There should, ideally, never be a feature that's in the right-click menu that's not accessible other places.

Gee, that seems to be a Microsoft idea, too, although they don't say that context menu items should always be available as menu bar items:

Avoid using a shortcut menu as the only way for a user to access a particular operation. At the same time, the items on a shortcut menu need not be limited only to commands that are included in drop-down menus. For example, you can include frequently used commands typically found in a secondary window, such as a specific property setting.

as Apple does in the Apple Human Interface Guidelines:

ever provide a contextual menu command that is not also accessible through the menu bar. Commands with keyboard shortcuts should be noted in the menu bar menu but not in the contextual menu. Use submenus with caution and keep them to one level.

The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines are somewhat less emphatic:

Since the user may not be aware of their presence, do not provide functions that are only accessible from popup menus unless you are confident that your target users will know how to use popup menus.

The KDE User Interface Guidelines don't have anything obvious on context/popup/shortcut menus.

Money isn't the only way Microsoft could stifle us.

A similar problem is posed with Mono: what if MS says, "Sure, our IP" -- I don't like the term, but play along -- "is open for anyone. But all OSS projects have to do this paperwork dance for approval." And then, they sit on the paperwork. Your cool new cross-platform whizzy-bangtacular project just got caught up in all kinds of red tape you'll never get out of. Do you really think, if MS (or any company) felt threatened and able to get away with such a thing, that they wouldn't try?

Similar scenarios have been posited, and I haven't seen a clear answer from either MS or the OSS folks on this. (Although I'd love to see an answer, one way or the other) I don't mean to spread FUD about Mono -- I think it's an excellent technology, from what I've seen -- or interoperating with MS XML. But will you really benefit enough to justify that kind of risk, when you could use the rapidly-maturing OpenOffice file standard (OpenDocument?) or one of the open-source cross platform GUI development kits? I'd take the disadvantages to using WxPython, Glade, or similar over losing my project to IP politics.

This mail from the GNOME Foundation mailing list is the end of an exchange between RMS and Jeff Waugh after the announcement of "Warty Warthog".

Quote: "I looked at the page you mentioned, which states Ubuntu's philosophy. It takes a strong stand in support of computer users' freedom; it
couldn't possibly be better. If the project followed this philosophy completely, I would say it was great. (Well, it ought to be called
Ubuntu GNU/Linux.)"

Dave.

I'm not a big dreamer. I just want ACL management in KDE and Gnome. This is great for offices getting off the Microsoft bandwagon.

http://bugs.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62817
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6976

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-multimedia/20 03-December/msg00088.html/
is that mean, I can legaly build software that play MP3s?

Those usability guidelines are associated with "desktop" layers, more than F/OSS generally. GNOME has its HIG, Apple has its vaunted HIG, and there are several others (including Microsoft's). Apple's is the most enforced, but Microsoft and Li/Unix have benefitted from losing that straitjacket. What's nice about standards is there's so many to chose from ;). But there is clearly a necessary balance between familiarity and innovation appropriate to the features.

Personally, I think the right way to handle the problem of multifarious users, without a tight enough community to ensure training, is multiple, selectable UI styles. All apps should separate their data, logic and user/programmer interfaces into clearly separated components. And the UI should be available in selectable versions. We already see this in Web apps, commonly offering both user and admin interfaces. User grades should be projected when designing the UI layer, and different UI versions (connecting to the same logic layer via a single API) should be available for different user grades. Ultimately, a UI toolkit would be available for users to create their own UI from the complete available featureset. But that's too good to come true :).

Then we must teach them about the alternitives. Gnumeric being the best imho, but also OO.o

There are plenty of usable window managers/desktop environments for UNIX.

I tried designing an XML-based programming language long ago and failed miserably. It just doesn't work out well.

XUL, or something like (lib)Glade is about as far as XML should be taken as a programming language IMHO. It's great for laying out widgets, and defining callbacks, that kind of thing. Beyond that, it just gets in the way.

Release every 6 months