Slashdot Mirror

• WIMP - Windowed Interface with Mouse Pointer

  This "model" has become fairly much dominant, and continues to undergo various forms of "tweaking," lately with everyone going gonzo over Themes.

  Unfortunately, major changes require either nuking the whole thing and starting from scratch, which is a lot of work, or else making systems of more and more byzantine complexity to operate.

  The latter is where adding additional "stuff-to-click" takes us. Every added toolbar results in another "hieroglyphic" language, moving us towards ancient Egyptian rather than anything modern. (The McLuhan "Laws of Media" strike again...)

• MVC - Model/View/Controller

  The more "intelligent" sorts of changes don't necessarily involve increasing the visible complexity, but rather trying to split systems more clearly into this paradigm of designing, somewhat separately, an underlying model, a set of controller functions to control the object, and then some form of "front end," or "view."

  It's hardly new; Smalltalk and NeXTStep promoted the MVC "view of the world" umpteen years ago, and the problem really is that the ad-hoc GUI construction systems have so often conflated M, V, and C together that many GUI applications wind up as jumbled sets of functionality.

  It may be that introducing things like Glade User Interface Builder along with libglade , to encourage keeping "controller" stuff in once place, GNOME-print, Gnome Canvas, DPS for XFree86, and Display Ghostscript, ReportLab, providing "view" tools, and CORBA, providing separation of "model," may provide a direction to clearly separate these functions so that GUIs will be less confused.

None of this represents dramatic, overnight change, and I'm not sure that that's a bad thing.

• WIMP - Windowed Interface with Mouse Pointer

  This "model" has become fairly much dominant, and continues to undergo various forms of "tweaking," lately with everyone going gonzo over Themes.

  Unfortunately, major changes require either nuking the whole thing and starting from scratch, which is a lot of work, or else making systems of more and more byzantine complexity to operate.

  The latter is where adding additional "stuff-to-click" takes us. Every added toolbar results in another "hieroglyphic" language, moving us towards ancient Egyptian rather than anything modern. (The McLuhan "Laws of Media" strike again...)

• MVC - Model/View/Controller

  The more "intelligent" sorts of changes don't necessarily involve increasing the visible complexity, but rather trying to split systems more clearly into this paradigm of designing, somewhat separately, an underlying model, a set of controller functions to control the object, and then some form of "front end," or "view."

  It's hardly new; Smalltalk and NeXTStep promoted the MVC "view of the world" umpteen years ago, and the problem really is that the ad-hoc GUI construction systems have so often conflated M, V, and C together that many GUI applications wind up as jumbled sets of functionality.

  It may be that introducing things like Glade User Interface Builder along with libglade , to encourage keeping "controller" stuff in once place, GNOME-print, Gnome Canvas, DPS for XFree86, and Display Ghostscript, ReportLab, providing "view" tools, and CORBA, providing separation of "model," may provide a direction to clearly separate these functions so that GUIs will be less confused.

None of this represents dramatic, overnight change, and I'm not sure that that's a bad thing.

Abi Word does not provide all the features you may expect from a word processor, but is quite useful IMHO. Gnumeric is a fairly advanced replacement for Excel and it keeps improving at an amazing pace. Give'em a try.

And don't forget to check the source.

check out Dia - part of Gnome office

I'm only a casual user, but it works fine for churning out those entity relationship diagrams that my friendly business manager likes so much.

----------------

hey, check out this article over here.

Wow, with so many ports of gnome, it's gonna be amazaing

I cannot wait ;)

The adress is here: http://mail.gnome.org/pipermail/gno me-kde-list/.

Uh, I just noticed:

You propably meant this Mail by Stefan Westerfeld, didn't you?

Yes, I have posted about this to gnotices (before the slashdot story came up). So people *are* complaining ;)

If you go check out Gnotices, you will see an interesting, seemingly unrelated article: The XMPS project has just released a version which supports DivX decompression... by using a MS-Windows DLL. XMPS is a GPLed Gtk+-based MPEG player. It is a GPLed app which uses a proprietary library. The licence makes no explicit exceptions. Sound familiar? Now read the Gnotices. See anyone complaining? I don't. Everyone looks thrilled. Somehow, I'm not surprised. Slashdot posters would react the same if the news got here. This is a Gtk+ app, after all.

I personally feel there is nothing wrong with what the XMPS project is doing. I actually applaud that clever trick and what it allows for users of free systems. I know my free software history: Emacs and GCC were born on non-free systems. They did what they could with what they had. So does XMPS. So does KDE. Hopefully, the situation will someday improve. But in the meantime, the people writing the GPLed code are the good guys and gals... Remember? (I guess not.)

But of course, anyone writing GPLed code and linking it against Qt is a GPL-badmouthing, uptight, arrogant, crack-smoking, gay devil-worshipper. Hundreds of posts and e-mails will tell you that. And I'm not even kidding about the "gay" part, which you know if you have read the comments on Freshmeat. When I see how such troll posts about KDE consistently get moderated up to +5 Intersting, I start looking for the button which allows me to moderate *all* of Slashdot down.

I would trolling if I did not have a point.

PS: I bought a Gnome T-shirt from Copyleft just so Gnome and the FSF would get a donation. Think about that before you write me off as an anti-GPL bigot.

Get excited.

KOffice and GNOME Office are coming.

As far as Excel being "the best spreadsheet app of its type", have you really used Gnumeric? You probably should try it. I mean the latest versions, too- maybe if you're up to it, you can research Bonobo and/or KParts while you're at it, and get *really* excited. Or not.

It's amazing nobody posted about this :)
In GNOME 1.2, click on the menu button and select the "About GNOME" item. Inside the About window, lock caps and write "GNOME", and an ugly GNOME will appear. If you click on it, you will hear a cute sound.
Furthermore, if you look at gnome-about.c, you will see a header that warns about the absence of easter eggs in the code :)

> Show me the source of Nautilus, NOW! You can't can you?

As a matter of fact, I can.

Nautilus is an open-source file manager and graphical shell being developed by Eazel, Inc. and others. It is part of the GNOME project, and its source code can be found in the GNOME CVS repository. Nautilus is still in the early stages of development. It will become an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment when it is finished.

Nautilus is an open-source file manager and graphical shell being developed by Eazel, Inc. and others. It is part of the GNOME project, and its source code can be found in the GNOME CVS repository. Nautilus is still in the early stages of development. It will become an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment when it is finished.

Nautilus is an open-source file manager and graphical shell being developed by Eazel, Inc. and others. It is part of the GNOME project, and its source code can be found in the GNOME CVS repository. Nautilus is still in the early stages of development. It will become an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment when it is finished.

• Nautilus Mailing List
• Nautilus Bug Database
• Nautilus Change Log
• Nautilus Screen Shots

Nautilus has many neat features, including:

• Bookmarks to local directories or files
• Graphics such as XPM and PNG have icons of their contents
• Zooming is supported
• Nautilus can display files in List view
• Any URI can have notes attached to it
• The man: URL scheme points to man pages
• Icons can be stretched
• JPEGs and other images can be displayed and edited with the GIMP
• MIME Content-Type header is shown
• New tabs can be created
• Text files contain preview of file using head command
• Eazel can be config ured
• Folder icon
• MP3s can be played and information on them can be viewed
• Root directory (file:///) view
• Gataxx
• Deskto p view
• Web DAV can be used. WebDAV is HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring, RFC2518 describes the official WebDAV standard

Nautilus is an open-source file manager and graphical shell being developed by Eazel, Inc. and others. It is part of the GNOME project, and its source code can be found in the GNOME CVS repository. Nautilus is still in the early stages of development. It will become an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment when it is finished.

• Nautilus Mailing List
• Nautilus Bug Database
• Nautilus Change Log
• Nautilus Screen Shots

Nautilus has many neat features, including:

• Bookmarks to local directories or files
• Graphics such as XPM and PNG have icons of their contents
• Zooming is supported
• Nautilus can display files in List view
• Any URI can have notes attached to it
• The man: URL scheme points to man pages
• Icons can be stretched
• JPEGs and other images can be displayed and edited with the GIMP
• MIME Content-Type header is shown
• New tabs can be created
• Text files contain preview of file using head command
• Eazel can be config ured
• Folder icon
• MP3s can be played and information on them can be viewed
• Root directory (file:///) view
• Gataxx
• Deskto p view
• Web DAV can be used. WebDAV is HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring, RFC2518 describes the official WebDAV standard

Nautilus is an open-source file manager and graphical shell being developed by Eazel, Inc. and others. It is part of the GNOME project, and its source code can be found in the GNOME CVS repository. Nautilus is still in the early stages of development. It will become an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment when it is finished.

• Nautilus Mailing List
• Nautilus Bug Database
• Nautilus Change Log
• Nautilus Screen Shots

Nautilus has many neat features, including:

• Bookmarks to local directories or files
• Graphics such as XPM and PNG have icons of their contents
• Zooming is supported
• Nautilus can display files in List view
• Any URI can have notes attached to it
• The man: URL scheme points to man pages
• Icons can be stretched
• JPEGs and other images can be displayed and edited with the GIMP
• MIME Content-Type header is shown
• New tabs can be created
• Text files contain preview of file using head command
• Eazel can be config ured
• Folder icon
• MP3s can be played and information on them can be viewed
• Root directory (file:///) view
• Gataxx
• Deskto p view
• Web DAV can be used. WebDAV is HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring, RFC2518 describes the official WebDAV standard

Nautilus is an open-source file manager and graphical shell being developed by Eazel, Inc. and others. It is part of the GNOME project, and its source code can be found in the GNOME CVS repository. Nautilus is still in the early stages of development. It will become an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment when it is finished.

• Nautilus Mailing List
• Nautilus Bug Database
• Nautilus Change Log
• Nautilus Screen Shots

Nautilus has many neat features, including:

• Bookmarks to local directories or files
• Graphics such as XPM and PNG have icons of their contents
• Zooming is supported
• Nautilus can display files in List view
• Any URI can have notes attached to it
• The man: URL scheme points to man pages
• Icons can be stretched
• JPEGs and other images can be displayed and edited with the GIMP
• MIME Content-Type header is shown
• New tabs can be created
• Text files contain preview of file using head command
• Eazel can be config ured
• Folder icon
• MP3s can be played and information on them can be viewed
• Root directory (file:///) view
• Gataxx
• Deskto p view
• Web DAV can be used. WebDAV is HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring, RFC2518 describes the official WebDAV standard

Nautilus is an open-source file manager and graphical shell being developed by Eazel, Inc. and others. It is part of the GNOME project, and its source code can be found in the GNOME CVS repository. Nautilus is still in the early stages of development. It will become an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment when it is finished.

• Nautilus Mailing List
• Nautilus Bug Database
• Nautilus Change Log
• Nautilus Screen Shots

Nautilus has many neat features, including:

• Bookmarks to local directories or files
• Graphics such as XPM and PNG have icons of their contents
• Zooming is supported
• Nautilus can display files in List view
• Any URI can have notes attached to it
• The man: URL scheme points to man pages
• Icons can be stretched
• JPEGs and other images can be displayed and edited with the GIMP
• MIME Content-Type header is shown
• New tabs can be created
• Text files contain preview of file using head command
• Eazel can be config ured
• Folder icon
• MP3s can be played and information on them can be viewed
• Root directory (file:///) view
• Gataxx
• Deskto p view
• Web DAV can be used. WebDAV is HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring, RFC2518 describes the official WebDAV standard

Did you have a look at the recent KDE 2.0 beta or a recent KDE 2.0 CVS snapshot? [If you haven't, download from kde.org or get Red Hat Linux binaries here]

Anyone who looks at it anywhere near objectively will notice that anyone who has used Windows can deal with it - the interfaces are similar, and as far as differences are concerned, KDE 2.0 wins in usability.

Something similar can be said about GNOME 1.2, which just needs some more time to get all the functionality implemented.

Red Hat Linux 7.0 will (probably) have an autologin feature for people who don't want to get used to the login process, and other distributions will probably follow.

KOffice (obviously) integrates perfectly with KDE - even StarOffice adds itself to the KDE menus so even the most stupid user can find it. Both of them can read M$-Office files, so converting old documents shouldn't be much of a problem.

I doubt a stupid user could tell the difference between a Windows system and a KDE 2 system that has been configured to look like Windows.

I agree about the "Code it. Use it. Debug it." part though - we need to demonstrate that we are not just a viable alternative, but the better one - if people don't care about reliablity, efficiency and speed, it's not as easy on the desktop as on servers...

RHAD Labs has shifted focus a bit. For a long time we were doing much of the GNOME user environment work, fixing bugs, making packages, and maintaining code. However Helix and Eazel have stepped up with far greater resources and expertise in this area than we have. So we've shifted our efforts to focus on libraries and development tools.

Gnome doesn't use Enlightenment anymore, but rather Sawfish which is supposed to fit in better with how E does things... There's an interesting article What's New in Gnome 1.2 on LinuxPower

MSDN is not really a realistic resource for useful data for interoperability with windows. There are a few nuggets spread thinly about the site but it is awesomely hard work to track them down, links are forever moving around and the search engine sucks. Formats are usually described in terms of their windows api interfaces and MS always invents new terms for existing standards and mechanisms. Concise and complete descriptions are hard to find

On the other hand people are very quick to assume that a format is secret or not documented, this is not always true so it is a very good idea to check msdn before simply lying back and saying "ack its proprietry, we can never support it". There are a lot of MS formats which could be supported right now from working with the available documentation. Simple examples which I did some fiddling with include the wmf format, emf format, pe and ne executable formats. In addition windows and dos programmers have often made source available to parse some of the undocumented formats already and just need some massaging to make that source crossplatform. And note that theres ole2 stream support for linux as well, so thats no barrier.

Wander over to wotsit.org and take an unsupported windows format and write a linux converter today.

C.

On a related note, I have been told by friends on the gnome mailing lists that Helix isn't going to make Debian packages because they feel it is "too hard". What the hell kind of logic is this? As if it is any harder to make a .deb than it is to make a .rpm?

Apple had always promoted the use of its new "Apple Event" technology by giving spellcheckers as an example; instead of propriety OEM spellcheckers that are different for every application, the user could have a single speller that is shared among all their applications. Since Working Software published Spellswell we felt we should take the lead in this.

It works really well and in fact can be used for any text operation, such as grammar checkers, address books, HTML verification and the like. Text encryption would work fine and I was working on a text encryptor but never finished it. I since led the binding of it to the BeOS (where is uses BMessages instead of Apple events) which you can read about here and I'd like to make an XWindows version, perhaps using the Corba API's provided by Gnome.

Recently I was contacted by someone who was searching for prior art. It seems someone patented interapplication spellchecking protocols and he has the hope that Word Services was developed early enough to invalidate that patent. I don't know the patent in question or who holds the patent.

What I especially have a gripe about is that I only started working on this method because the idea of it had been promoted for several years by Apple as an obvious application of a new technology they were promoting.

Mike

It's Gnome 1.2 that's out now, and Helix Code, being the awesome guys that they are, have already packaged it into the "Helix" distribution, or whatever. I'm not knocking Helix or Red Hat, it's just strange to see the news that Gnome 1.2 is released under the heading of "Helix Gnome 1.2 Released." Even if Helix is Miguel's company...

:)

(Hey, www.gnome.org has a new look, too!)

---

• GNOME.org press relase about "Bongo" GNOME

And, just for the sake of it, you might want to check out the new look on www.gnome.org... ;)

• GNOME.org press relase about "Bongo" GNOME

And, just for the sake of it, you might want to check out the new look on www.gnome.org... ;)

This is actually Gnome 1.2. As Helix code often point out, they simply re-package Gnome. Having said that, this is a great leap forward for gnome, now if only they went through the bug reports and fixed them all. In the current state, Microsoft could say, look at all these bugs, they have thousands to fix as well.

Re: Configuration.
GNOMEs (specifically hp) are working on a solution, called GConf.
In particular, it is backend independant (already has an XML backend, should have an LDAP backend sometime, etc.) and supports notification if settings change and elegant handling of system v. user preferences.
It's not stable yet, but it'll be used in GNOME 2.0 (and some 1.x prolly).
I don't know of any other such projects, but AFAIK, GConf is not GNOME specific, and legacy apps could be ported to use it. Thus, we can move to graphical configuration as fast or slow as developers want.

Suspicious, I consulted my friendly install of StarOffice on my Linux machine. He didn't answer back, which is what I woudl have expected from M$ Office, and StarOffice continued to happily to my word processing without bother or error.

Moving back over to my Windows machine with M$ Office... that little MechWarrior like droid was not at all happy! He threatened to allow the 'I love you' worm to work its way through my machine via its evil powers of VB scripting.

Flustered... I then remembered who should be in control of the computer in the first place... ME! I promtly played my own ace-in-the-hole against that evil little M$ droid, named "F1", and hit the power button on the computer.

With F1 no longer being a concern, and no virus or VB script security problems on my Linux machine... I moved back over to the screen with the Gnome footprint eagerly waiting to do what I request without problem or crash.

I donned my red hat and rode off in into the lovely sunset with my StarOffice at my side.

• This has nothing to do with the XFree86 code base.

  The restrictions that the XFree86 team have on releasing source code have nothing to do with the non-freeness of Motif, and everything to do with the fact that hardware vendors sometimes release documentation for hardware on the basis of Non Disclosure Agreements.

  Why would you think that the "partial freeing" of Motif would have anything at all to do with the activities of The XFree86 Project?

• As for anti-aliasing font handling, there are two methods to implement this:
  • As an extension to the X protocol.

    Perhaps in X11R6.5.

    As an extension, this would mean that only new applications that are aware of the new extension would use the new font handling scheme.

  • As an extension to some existing libraries.

    For instance, the GNOME "Canvas" appears to provide support for the use of anti-aliased fonts right now. Ditto for Display Postscript.

    Of course, in order to use the antialiased facilities, applications have to be specifically coded to use things like GNOME Canvas or DPS. Existing applications don't get benefit of it "for free."

  The only way that "legacy" applications would get any benefit from this extension is if they use libraries like GTK or Tk, and those libraries can be compatibly retrofitted to use anti-aliasing.

  Again, this is a matter that is almost entirely irrelevant to the "opening up" of Motif source code.

(whiteflag -- no desktop flamewar, please)
GNOME 1.1.90 (GNOME 1.2 Beta) also has been released.
Christopher A. Bohn

That's all well and good. I'm sure the people at gnome-list would be happy to hear your revolutionary user interface design for Evolution. If you don't personally have a better idea then please, for the love of Linus, what email client should Evolution be imitating?

Please, visit the helixcode and gnome gb webpages and RTFMs. I say this as both a user of GB, Gnumeric, et. al. and a developer on those projects, I *highly* suggest reading the manuals before making statements like these. And you might also want to read Miguel's many comments already in this thread.

http://www.gnome.org/gb/ is a good place to start

Dom

Well, we take security seriously in the GNOME project. Our implementation of Visual Basic for GNOME (it is required for perfect Office compatibility) actually runs in a Sandboxed environment, just like Java does.

The equivalent of the "ILOVEYOU" virus would generate a security exception in any application using GB in the future (no application currently uses GB, as it is still a project under development).

Miguel.

No, no one is flaming (or should be flaming) people writing software in their own language. I don't know where you got that from. If you're talking about closed-source apps, I might agree that people might complain about English being the only choice. But with open source - no. The standard "do it yourself" often apply, interpreted as "translate it yourself". No need to rewrite the entire app, if the app was made cleverly. gettext will parse many c programs just fine.

No one expects you to translate your software into 11 zillion different languages. What you might do, however, is to make it easier for translators. This may be such things as not hard-coding US-ASCII everywhere. This may sound simple, but I've seen many programs not accept filenames with non-US-ASCII characters, or where such characters simply break the app.

It might also be to write the strings in your app so that they are easy understandable even out of their context. This helps translators a lot. Avoid TLAs when you can and write easy understandable sentences.

Also try to avoid assuming that all others whould like the same localization as you. Don't hard-code these settings in your application for example:

• AM/PM clock
• Legal paper format
• Weeks begin on Sunday
• Date formats and date strings
• Inches

As for american programmers writing in english: Don't assume that most programmers writing applications in English are american. If you look at the contributor list of many free software projects (like the GNOME and KDE ones) you'll see that a lot of them are not from the US, maybe even the majority. English just happens to be the default language that applications are written in, and then translated into as many other languages as possible.

Disclaimer: I am a Translation Project translator, translating GNU software.

I think the open source community needs to spend more time in the software design phase. Where I work, we don't code until we have TONS of diagrams/description of logic done. Overall, I think it leads to a much better product.

Documentation and DOL are extremely important... reminds me of a development tool that I have used that would compile psuedo code... haha. Funny stuff.

Have to agree. As it happens, I've been looking around lately for some higher-level design tools, and unfortunately, there's not a lot out there in the free-software realm. freshmeat lists Libero and TCM, which look good, but probably aren't the ultimate in software design.

Speaking of doc, what do you guys feel is the best tool for managing it. I mean something akin to doc++ or Doxygen. Are there any other better solutions?

I haven't really used any of the doc-generating programs out there-- but let me mention gtkdoc, which for C API's is probably the best of them all. (See here for an example-- ain't it beautiful?) It works through Docbook SGML and the Jade processor to produce HTML, TeX, man, and anything else you have a stylesheet for. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a b**** to get working. It's a huge mess of Perl scripts and weird Makefile rules, I tried it one day and barely made it out alive :-(

(But man, results like that GLib documentation would be worth it!)

Of course, however, all those tools assume that your approach to documentation is placing specially formatted comments (Javadoc-style or otherwise) above each of your module/type/function definitions. I don't know of a better way to go about it-- tying the implementation and documentation together makes it hard to neglect keeping the docs up to date-- but it surely isn't the only approach.

I think this is an unfair generalisation. The vast majority of code I work with is clean, well-designed, and adheres to one of the style and coding standards out there. That includes the kernel sources, Glib, Gtk+, the Gnome libs, python, Perl, and loads of others.
If you mean that the vast majority of small applications are complete crap, you could be right. But don't knock the single programmer who need to scratch an itch. If enough people are interested in his or her project, they'll help - including design and style improvements and suggestions.

The OSS community needs to establish some quality standards. Linux code is relatively new, but this is going to bite everyone in the butt as the code gets modified more and more, and software rot starts to rear its ugly head.

Seems to be doing just fine so far - the OSS community is pretty aggressive about coding standards already.

• The Gnome Developer's site has some strongly worded docs on style, consistency, robustness and correctness for prospective developers.
  
• /usr/src/linux/Documentation/kernel-coding-style .txt has Linus's words on the subject of style.
• The GNU coding standards have also been around for a while.

Mark my words: Unless coding standards get real important soon, OSS is going to collapse under its own weight. "As long as it works" is not good enough.

Whereas of course closed-source software is bound to survive since all development houses rigidly enforce coding standards?
Bollocks. Been there, done that, shipped it because it compiled. In the bazaar model and peer review style of the OSS world, you can't get away with crappy code or bad design for very long. If your project's well designed, maintainable, useful and easy to read as well as being robust, it will survive. If not, then you can't get away with shipping only binaries to some poor customer.

Perhaps the Gnome team can eventually take the Mozilla engine and build a decent browser for unix with an interface that works, but they are showing little interest in doing that. Why they haven't does puzzle me a lot.

Basically, Nautilus (the Eazle file manager) will now embed the Bonobo mozilla component. In one step Nautilus has leaprogged Konquerer and Opera in standards-compliant web browsing, and provided a native GTK-zilla without any of that skin bloat.

Of course we'll have to wait a few months for a Nautilus beta. But I guess it'll take that long to fix the memory leaks in Mozilla.

Look for GNOME-DB or wait for Katabase, included in KDE2 (release in July -personnal estimation). There are always linux solutions!

Squishdot is not a port of the slashcode, it's a clone of some of the basic Slashdot functionality that was produced long before the recent release of the slashcode. It currently lacks features such as self-registration, member pages, post ranking, member pages, etc.

Nevertheless, it is an astonishingly useful product, and can be set up on a working Zope installation within about 5 minutes.

Some sites running Squishdot include:
Technocrat.net
Gnotices, Gnome developer News
70South
eBiquity.org
91.266A - Numerical Methods

and my own FIAWOL site.

There is also a big project underway to build a 'Portal Toolkit' (PTK) for Zope. You can find it here. The features of the PTK include self-registration, member pages, wizards for member contributed content, a review mechanism for member contributed content, multiple integrated sources for user authentication, most portal content 'discussable', etc.
--

I wore my BeOS Master's Award polo shirt that I won (honorable mention) for porting Spellswell from MacOS to the BeOS

(It uses a protocol called Word Services that links word processors and email clients to spellers and other text services (including text encryption); the award was as much for bringing Word Services to the BeOS as for Spellswell itself. I plan to do the same for Linux soon, possibly through the CORBA techniques they use in Gnome - http://www.gnome.org seems to be down or I'd link to the relevant page there.)

I'm pretty active in the Be developer community.

I'm also pretty critical of Be because of their complete lack of any sense as far as managing the business and handling developer relations and I have no qualms about making my views known to them and other developers, both in public and in private discussions.

I've always been a shy and quiet person but there's something about living through experiences such as I've had that makes such things as speaking up in public about mere work matters pretty easy in comparison.

Remember my sig: Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. Words I live by.

I thought it would provoke quite a lively response to post the link to the Metro article to BeUserTalk and BeDevTalk. I got a couple private responses and one public one. I was very glad to get the responses I did get though.

On the other hand, I submitted this article to Slashdot but figured it wouldn't get posted, considering the dozens of articles I've submitted that I think were more directly relevant to open source programming, privacy, free speech, encryption and so on, but this is the one that gets on.

And my manic depression page, which grew to get 3000 hits last month (it's linked from some bipolar sites and the bipolar category on Yahoo), has gotten 4800 hits in ten hours.

No, I should have worn my Release Your Inner Nerd t-shirt that I bought from the Slashdot booth at the Linuxworld Expo in San Jose a while back.

(Wore it shopping for wedding supplies with my fiance the other day :-) ).

Michael D. Crawford

Also my wv project has a passable word reader that abiword is using as a word importer, and gnumeric has quite a good excel importer

C.

The printing architecture is ready to be used today. You can download it from:

ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GN OME/stable/sources/gnome-print

Various applications include support for it (Gnumeric is the one I maintain that uses it).

The Evolution code base will be available for a preview test in a few weeks. Keep your eyes open.

Best wishes,

Miguel

Right now, gnumeric can import excel, and could do with more help

abiword uses wv to import word documents, kword also uses wv though they have seen fit to branch off their own version to do so. It too could do with more help

These specifications are also available on the July 1998 MSDN Microsoft Developer CD. They are stored on this CD in the proprietry .ivt format, but nonetheless I've even implemented an .ivt to .html converter for you to read those files under linux.

Get ivt2html and convert that office.ivt on disk 3

Alternatively wotsit.org has versions of many of them as well, including the word 6 file format which wv can handle as well

Now if someone wanted to do something constructive but wants to start small, then rather than sitting around on their arse blathering uselessly they could take a look at the public specs for mathtype and put together a linux equation edit file format to mathml converter which both abi and kword might use as an importer for equations.

Or they could help enhance libwmf to convert wmf files into svg format.

Its not just the office formats that are the problem, its the fact that they all embed or are based upon, or otherwise require the ability to convert all the secondary windows formats as well, so theres loads to see and do

C.

You mean, for instance, an operating system?

Or maybe a graphical desktop environment or two?

How terribly shortsighted. I'm sure there are many people out there who are up to the challenge.

Besides, what you're basically saying is that open source projects don't scale very well, and all of the above examples disprove that.
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I believe tat this is because GTK+ was written in C. here is the relevant section from Havoc Pennington's GTK+/Gnome Application Development:

"Why is GTK+ written in C?

First and foremost: asking this question in any public forum is strongly discouraged. Don't do it. Check the archives for several extended off-topic
flamefests if you're interested.

Here are some reasons:

The original authors wanted to write it in C, and now many C-only applications are based on it. The current authors enjoy C.

GTK+ handles types and objects much more flexibly than C++; it is runtime-oriented, more like Java or Objective C than C++ system. This
is convenient for GUI builders and language bindings.

C is the lingua franca of UNIX development; most people know how to code in it.

There are already nice toolkits for languages such as Java and Objective C. There are C++ wrappers for GTK+; several, in fact.

C is more portable than C++; ANSI C++ is not yet widely implemented, so only an ill-defined subset of C++ can actually be used.

When GTK+ development first started, there was no free, working C++ compiler.

Again: do not ask this question on any mailing lists, because people will not be amused. "


"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2

...is the gnome print architecture, which is already in Debian Potato and possibly others (I know RPM's exist). (Not that it does much good until apps use it -- but it *is* working. I believe Gnumeric uses it).