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Miguel Delivers State of Gnome Address
Skeezix writes "Miguel de Icaza has delivered the State of Gnome Address in which he gives an excellent summary of the current state of Gnome, what is being worked on, what the future looks like, and how you can help."
The recent announcement of Apple included some very amazing
screenshots of what they could do with their technology. I was
impressed by it for the first two hours, until I realized how easy it
would be for us to actually pull a hack like that.
Although the fully-transparent system can be done with little
effort (as we have a very powerful infrastructure to achieve it: Raph
Levien's libart) a lot of work has to go *first* into making GNOME
easier to use, more intuitive and more easy for newcomers.
If you've seen the screenshot he is refering to that is a pretty impressive statement. Gnome is and is going to be an extremely advanced application framework. But as Miguel points out, there is much work that needs to be done now to make the Gnome Desktop ready to take the world by storm. And no matter who you are, there is something you can do to help.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
2^n++ * 0.01 cents for you.
This should be "clients can drive the parsing process instead of the parser taking control." This is really cool when you're trying to parse XML and HTML streams from potentially blocking input streams, such as the network. Props to DV for doing this!
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
*pfffffft*
:)
That was the sound of water being expelled from my mouth and onto my computer's monitor at a high velocity after reading the above post.
As someone who uses both Gnome, OpenWindows and CDE regularly (on Intel and Sun workstations), I have to say that, on all accounts, Gnome is by far superior. Much more so when it behaves differently from both OW and CDE than when it behaves like those.
Sure, there's Lesstif, and there's probably a few dozen Free CDE clones around. But a lot of excellent work has been done on Gnome, to the point where it can be considered far superior for worstation use than CDE. As for porting current apps to Gnome, Lesstif makes it perfectly possible.
There isn't even the usual excuse of "eliminating duplication of effort". As long as we're writing software on our own, let's try to go beyond what has already done. I mean, look at what happened the last time someone tried to write an Unix clone
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Come on, of course it's trivial to add transparency to the desktop if you have a rendering system that supports Alpha channel. Windows 2000 even supports this, and there are little utilities that let you turn transparent windows on and off. Miguel would be sadly mistaken if he thinks this is all he has to add to GNOME to compete with Apple, or even Java2. Enlightenment/imlib already provides transparency in themes, but they provide *zippo* support to apps that want to render say, a 300DPI illustration.
What Miguel is missing is that Aqua is not about transparency, it's about Quartz, the Display-PDF rendering system. The NeXT display postscript system and Sun's NeWS could also handle alpha easily, but does anyone think that the only useful feature of Display Postscript or Quartz is being able to render alpha?
Systems like Quartz, DPS, and Java2D are resolution independent, support anti-aliasing on everything, full affine transformations for everything, virtually all compositing modes you can think of, built in ability to stroke complex shapes, like lines using arbitrary thickness, fill, dash-pattern, and endcaps. For instance, with Java2D it's almost trivial to write a postscript/pdf/svg renderer because the base library is so powerful.
Miguel's solution might resemble Aqua's transparent windows, but without a real 2D rasterization engine, GNOME apps will never approach the flexibility of Quartz apps in rendering. In fact, he won't even approach the quality of Aqua's nice warping/scaling of images with aliasing artifacts.
What I really hate is this not-invented-here tendency to automatically superficially evaluate and dismiss other people's technology without even doing 10 minutes of research besides looking at screenshots, and then making public assertions about how trivial it is, and how much better your "solution" will be.
Clearly, Linux's GUI toolkits need a powerful comprehensive resolution independent 2D API to support powerful display and printing apps. The current mode of separating the display and printing APIs is a pain in the ass to develop for.
The best innovations are built on the shoulders of others, and if Miguel would spend more time learning and stealing technology from Apple, Microsoft, and even the KDE team, and less time dismissing everything and trying to reinvent it, maybe GNOME wouldn't be so buggy and unusable.