10 Years of OpenStep

Go NeXT! by dampjam · 2004-10-19 01:41 · Score: 1

Way to go, congrats!

Next by 2.7182 · 2004-10-19 01:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

I was a really big Next user, and for me OS X seems to be the natural extension of it. But it was amazing to be using Next machines in the early 90's. They were remarkably ahead of their time.

Re:Next by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:02 · Score: 0

Yes, and it's even more amazing that in many ways they are still unsurpassed ... only Apple Mac OS X comes near.

But most of the world is working on environments
(such as the blue screen of monopoly death o/s) which are light years behind what NeXT was offering you almost 15 years ago ...

Ever being wondering why the scrollbar is always on the right of the text area while you're typing (and you've got the mouse) most of the times on the left ? That's the kind of stuff which really irritates me! Power to people! Scrollbars on the left!

Luckily GNUstep on Linux gets it right.
Re:Next by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:06 · Score: 0

I never got to use NeXT--the machines were expensive and, when they finally did an x86 port, the software was as expensive as the memory I would have needed to purchase to make it worthwhile.

I do recall buying several issues of the magazine that was devoted to NeXT(can't recall the name of it) and the one thing that always seemed unusual to me was the back-page where they listed software popularity: the number one spot was always held by a PC emulator.
Re:Next by timeOday · 2004-10-19 02:11 · Score: 0

They were expensive!
Re:Next by DrSkwid · 2004-10-19 02:22 · Score: 1

and plan9

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Re:Next by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:42 · Score: 1, Funny

I have never wondered this.

Get a mouse wheel.
Re:Next by Lodragandraoidh · 2004-10-19 02:47 · Score: 1

I have an old PIII 500 mhz machine I use as my file server, running linux.

On a lark I loaded GNUstep as the default windowing environment. I like it - but haven't explored all of its capabilities and limitations yet.

--

Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Re:Next by sgant · 2004-10-19 02:52 · Score: 2, Informative

GNUstep isn't a windowing environment...it's a development environment. Windowmaker is the windowing environment that looks like NeXTStep.

Right on www.gnustep.org it states:

GNUstep itself is not an operating system, window manager or desktop environment, though there are several desktop environments in development that are based on it.

just some info.

--

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Re:Next by Daengbo · 2004-10-19 03:01 · Score: 4, Interesting

OK, suppose I want an OpenStep desktop on a GNU/Linux system... What desktop should I use? GnuStep gives me no good answer!

GNUstep is development environment, not a window manager Many people have confused GNUstep with WindowMaker. GNUstep, however, is not a window manager. WindowMaker is the most often-used NeXT-looking application on a non-NeXT system. WindowMaker also uses a derivation of the GNUstep logo. WindowMaker is the preferred GNUstep window manager, but GNUstep applications also work with any window manager, although you're most likely, currently, to have a more cohesive desktop experience if you use the two in conjunction.

Relation to WindowMaker WindowMaker is a window manager, not a workspace manager nor a file browser. It is nothing more. WindowMaker and GNUstep share almost no libraries or functionality. WindowMaker is written in C, and GNUstep is written in Objective-C. WindowMaker does make certain things easier for GNUstep, but it is not GNUstep itself, although it is a part of the project.
Well, then... GnuStep seems to recommend WM as the choice for Gnustep applications, but isn't itself Gnustep in any way.

Is there anything that is? I would like to install and play for at least five minutes...

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Put identity in the browser.
Re:Next by roard · 2004-10-19 03:48 · Score: 3, Informative

You could want to install/use Backbone or Garma, which are GNUstep-based Desktops...
Re:Next by jeif1k · 2004-10-19 04:01 · Score: 1

What was even more amazing was using Smalltalk a decade before NeXT. NeXT was modeled on Smalltalk, but relative to Smalltalk, even NeXT seemed cumbersome.

And the guys who brought you Smalltalk are bringing you more neat stuff; see the story on OpenCroquet earlier.
Re:Next by Daengbo · 2004-10-19 04:06 · Score: 1

Thanks

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Put identity in the browser.
Re:Next by Florian · 2004-10-19 04:21 · Score: 1

Well, then... GnuStep seems to recommend WM as the choice for Gnustep applications, but isn't itself Gnustep in any way.

The answer is simple: Window Maker is a mockup of the original NextStep desktop look'n'feel, but doesn't use any OpenStep/Gnustep/Cococa libraries or programming paradigms - just like fvwm95 superficially looks like Win95/98, but implements nothing of the underlying Windows API/framework, an infinitely more complex effort pursued, for example, by WINE. So GNUstep is not a window manager, but a free implementation of the entire OpenStep class library framework. Because it doesn't have a window manager of its own yet (i.e. a program that draws window decorations and makes windows movable and resizable), it recommends Window Maker for that task.

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Re:Next by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:33 · Score: 1, Insightful

you're typing (and you've got the mouse) most of the times on the left?
Normal people have the mouse on the right. It would be nice to have the scrollbars switchable though, at least for those genetic mutants known as "southpaws".
Re:Next by Daengbo · 2004-10-19 04:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

I appreciate the long explanation, but I understood that part and was looking for a wm (not WM, haha) that was based on GnuStep, but there doesn't appear to be anything like that, though several attempts have been made and a distro (Linux-Step?) aborted.

Although this is going to sound a lto like flamebait, it is a real question... Is GnuStep a viable platform? Ten years without a wm based on it? It sounds like a perfect match for the Hurd, a technically superior solution that never goes anywhere and never dies. (OK, maybe the last sentence WAS flamebait)

--
Put identity in the browser.
Re:Next by WWWWolf · 2004-10-19 05:30 · Score: 1

Is GnuStep a viable platform? Ten years without a wm based on it?

GNUstep people have probably been more busy with the libraries and such. GNUstep applications work with any X window manager. Window Maker works beautifully and takes the most important GNUstep special features in account. There are dozens of other window managers that work just as well. So developing a window manager probably wasn't important at this point.

From developer point of view, GNUstep base libraries are good enough to be used right now.

From user point of view, GNUstep works pretty well and is included in many free *NIX packaging systems, and isn't too complex to install either. The only bad thing is that there aren't great many GNUstep applications. Yet.
Re:Next by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 06:51 · Score: 3, Informative

NeXT wasn't modeled on Smalltalk. I was there for years and no one talked about Smalltalk. Maybe you mean that Objective-C was modeled on Smalltalk, which was true, but no one was thinking, "Let's make a better version of Smalltalk"; it wasn't even on the radar.

The beauty of Objective-C was that it was just enough OO. In practice, you could make your code as efficient as C and you could have full control over your (small) memory footprint, and we made great use of inheritance, reuse, polymorphism, and late binding and linking, but it was lightweight enough that a full system ran well in 32 megs of RAM, and for everything I did, you wouldn't even be swapping if you had 48 megs for the entire system. We even had Objective-C in the kernel so you could subclass drivers. I like the syntax of Java, but it's a bloated pig by comparison and I would never use it on a server that I expected to scale, while I wouldn't hesitate to use Obj-C in this manner.

Smalltalk may have been a more pure OO environment or better for rapid turnaround development, but no one has used it for the kinds of applications or system that NeXTstep excelled at 15 years ago (or OSX does of late).
Re:Next by Lodragandraoidh · 2004-10-19 07:10 · Score: 1

nitpicker....

At any rate, yes GNUstep is the framework that WindowMaker and its tools are built on to be completely accurate.

For all intents and purposes, GNUstep is a free implementation of the NEXTstep specification, which underpins every native WindowMaker application. However, WindowMaker also allows you to run other X11 (XFree86 and its successor) applications as well.

So I was right - depending upon what your definition of 'is' is.

--

Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Re:Next by roard · 2004-10-19 07:13 · Score: 1

At any rate, yes GNUstep is the framework that WindowMaker and its tools are built on to be completely accurate.
Well.. actually, no, that was the point. WindowMaker doesn't use GNUstep and it's not even programmed in Objective-C ! But, it's considered as the "default" WM for GNUstep applications, as it implements some support for GNUstep apps, but that's all.
Re:Next by grahamlee · 2004-10-19 07:30 · Score: 1

It wasn't NeXTWorld by any chance?
Re:Next by Lodragandraoidh · 2004-10-19 08:02 · Score: 1

So what is a complete implementation, then?

If WindowMaker is the only thing going, then defacto it is the standard.

Additionally, my understanding is that the applications, such as the workplace manager, are GNUstep applications. What functionality is missing when I run it under WindowMaker?

Logically, something would have to implement the GNUstep framework, in order for GNUstep applications to run - I don't see how you would build a GNUstep GNUstep emulator, as a result.

Am I off base here? If so, how?

--

Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Re:Next by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 08:08 · Score: 0

"Normal" people have the mouse on the right because that's where the scrollbars are. But it really makes more sense to have the scrollbars on the left, even for right-handers, in a left-to-right written language like English. That's where all the justification is; text, text entry fields, etc., are all concentrate on the left side of the window, where your attention is. There's less "context-switching" having to look back from (usually) the left side of the screen, to the scrollbar, and back.
Re:Next by roard · 2004-10-19 08:36 · Score: 3, Informative

Hm..I thinkg you misunderstand how things are related in fact.. under X-Window, you need a special program, in charge of the window management (ie, to move them, etc.). It's called.. a window manager. WindowMaker is a X11 window manager.
Then you have X11 programs, that are in charge of their window's content. As programming directly using XLib is not fun, there is a lot of X11 "toolkits". Qt and Gtk are examples of toolkits.
GNUstep is an implementation of the OpenStep API. Basically, it's a programming library, a toolkit like Qt and Gtk if you want -- not only for graphic apps, but also for non-graphic apps. In fact, the OpenStep API is divided in two frameworks: Foundation (which deals with non-graphical things such as threads, files, unicode strings, etc.) and AppKit (which provides all the nifty widgets and how you use them). But, additionally to that, GNUstep *also* provides development applications: Gorm, a graphical interface builder, and ProjectBuilder, an IDE.
Actually, GNUstep runs mainly on X11, but the way it is architectured, it's not that complex to use other drawing display. For example, there is 3 backends for X11 -- one using xlib, the other using libart, and the third using Cairo. And there is a backend for Windows GDI. So in fact, it's not tied at all to a X11, and the notion of an independant window manager is specific to X11 (actually, GNUstep apps don't really need a window manager even under X11 -- they can manage themselves..).
But, if you're under X11, chances are that you want to run other programs alongside GNUstep programs -- KDE/GNOME programs for example. You then *need* a window manager. WindowMaker is the "default" window manager recommanded by the GNUstep project, mainly because its look and feel match the GNUstep look and feel. But you can use others window manager.
And WindowMaker itself doesn't use GNUstep.
Not sure if I understood well your questions, I tried to explain how things are related, hopefully more clearly.
Re:Next by joeljkp · 2004-10-19 10:19 · Score: 1

Here's a corollary question:

If OpenStep is simply a framework, then why do all of its apps have the same look and feel? Is it also a GUI toolkit, like GTK+ or QT? Is work ongoing to make it less... ugly?

Is the reason the desktop looks like that just a coincidence, or is there a reason that OpenStep-based desktops all have the menu at the top right and the docks around the side?

--
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Re:Next by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 10:42 · Score: 0

NeXT wasn't modeled on Smalltalk. I was there for years and no one talked about Smalltalk.

Only the people who put the stuff into the APIs needed to know about where it came from; as a developer, you'd only see the NeXT documentation. It doesn't surprise me that people didn't talk about the contributions of others; it seems to be the m.o. at NeXT and Apple.

The beauty of Objective-C was that it was just enough OO. In practice, you could make your code as efficient as C and you could have full control over your (small) memory footprint, and we made great use of inheritance, reuse, polymorphism, and late binding and linking, but it was lightweight enough that a full system ran well in 32 megs of RAM,

The sad thing is that you are probably serious in thinking that that was "lightweight" or "efficient".
Re:Next by mrchaotica · 2004-10-19 11:48 · Score: 1

Yes, except it's not quite GNUStep -- it's Mac OS X ; )

On a more serious note, it probably is (not sure since I haven't installed it on my Linux computers yet). It would really be great if people recompiled their Cocoa software for it...

--
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Re:Next by jcr · 2004-10-20 08:40 · Score: 1

You may not have heard people talking about it much, but many people at NeXT were intimately aware of Smalltalk. Have a look at the Smalltalk-80 book, and you'll be very suprised at the level of conceptual continuity between ST-80 and the AppKit.

-jcr

--
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Re:Next by RAMMS+EIN · 2004-10-20 09:45 · Score: 1

``If OpenStep is simply a framework, then why do all of its apps have the same look and feel?''

Because GUI classes are part of the framework. This is very obvious if you RTFW.

``Is work ongoing to make it less... ugly?''

There has been some progress on making it themeable (Camaeleon). I have been disappointed with the achievements, though.

--
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Re:Next by Lodragandraoidh · 2004-10-21 09:11 · Score: 1

Thanks for that synopsis. Seems the reality is more convoluted than first impressions imply.

--

Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain

Call me stupid, but.... by rwven · 2004-10-19 01:44 · Score: 2, Interesting

I've been around computers a long time and i've never heard of it. What major application can anyone mention that has been developed on it? A 10th anniversary of something that barely anyone has ever used (in the big scheme of things) is really not any great thing to celebrate... I like the idea of it, but i'm not sure it's as wonderful of a hit as this news article is trying to make it seem.... Or am i off the mark here?

Re:Call me stupid, but.... by CoolMoDee · 2004-10-19 01:46 · Score: 4, Informative

The first web browser was developed with NeXT and Openstep...

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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 01:46 · Score: 0

No, you're not off the mark at all. For all their self-congratulations, you'd be hard-pressed to find any truly remarkable, widely used application based on that framework.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Nexum · 2004-10-19 01:47 · Score: 5, Informative

What about the first web browser for a start?

The first wholescale industrial use of OOP practices?

etc. Do some googling.

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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by oudzeeman · 2004-10-19 01:48 · Score: 2, Insightful

Most OS X apps...
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by AKAImBatman · 2004-10-19 01:49 · Score: 5, Informative

The NeXTStep (a.k.a. OpenStep) API was developed as part of the NeXTOS that ran on NeXT workstations during the 90's. Several deals were made with other Unix vendors (including Sun) for them to support the "OpenStep" standard.

NeXT was bought off by Apple, and was developed into Mac OS X. The OS X Cocoa API is really nothing more than the NeXTStep API set, and is almost 100% source compatible with programs from the old NeXT machines.

More Information

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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 01:49 · Score: 0

Is the first web browser major enough? FWIW, Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT.

(OK, the API was slightly older NEXTSTEP and not OpenStep, but hey, it's kinda close...)
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by mirko · 2004-10-19 01:49 · Score: 5, Informative

The game Doom was also developed on NeXT.

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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 01:51 · Score: 1, Informative

> What major application can anyone mention that has been developed on it?

Doom.

Mathematica.

The first web browser.

And a shitload of others.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by WillAdams · 2004-10-19 01:56 · Score: 5, Informative

WorldWideWeb.app and Doom have already been mentioned --- lengthy discussion of the former in the book _Weaving the Web_ by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, check the source for Doom.app and John Carmack's blog to learn how he feels about NeXTstep.

Other things:

- Altsys Virtuoso (this became Macromedia FreeHand)
- Lotus Improv (which lives on as Quantrix or Flexisheet)
- MusicKit
- MiscKit
- Pages by Pages
- TouchType.app

Other more recent developments:

- Cenon - http://www.cenon.info
- GNUmail
- ProjectCenter
- GORM

William

--
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by DrXym · 2004-10-19 01:57 · Score: 1, Interesting

Most OS X apps use Cocoa & Objective-C for their front-end. Whether this is through choice, or because XCode compells you to do this is a matter for debate.

Personally I think the tools that ship in XCode / Project Builder for constructing UIs are (ironically) the most user-unfriendly and unintuitive I've ever encountered. Part of the blame falls squarely on the interactive help which is awful compared to the MSDN for example.

That's not to say I don't think Objective-C is elegant but I'd still prefer C++ and a conventional GUI editor for all the alleged 'pain' that would entail.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by bmalnad · 2004-10-19 01:58 · Score: 0

NeXT was used heavily in the financial world.

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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:00 · Score: 0, Funny

You should hire yourself out for Cocoa developer parties.

Throw your empty beer cans at the idiot!
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by afidel · 2004-10-19 02:00 · Score: 0

and the cases burned really well due to the fact that they were cast magnesium =) Back in the mid 90's I lusted after a beutiful black cube of my own, even when Jobs was making high end workstations he had good asthetics.

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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by AKAImBatman · 2004-10-19 02:05 · Score: 3, Insightful

and the cases burned really well due to the fact that they were cast magnesium

Poppycock. The cases were a magnesium alloy. The only way the guy got it to burn was to heat it to several thousand degrees so that the alloy broke down. Not to mention that he had to try it with two different cases, AND use tons of lighter fluid to get one to ignite. :-)

--
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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by DavidLeblond · 2004-10-19 02:08 · Score: 1

User un-friendly? Interface builder? So placing a button on a window and drawing a line from the button to the class is un-friendly to you? Do you have no arms?
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:09 · Score: 0

While this may be true, DOOM doesn't use OpenStep or Objective-C.

DOOM was mainly known for its high-performance SVGA graphics, which has nothing at all to do with NeXT hardware.

So there's nothing much to the Doom-Next connection. Maybe Carmack liked the Next IDE.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by jcostantino · 2004-10-19 02:10 · Score: 1

Actually they didn't.
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/08/10/1646241.shtm l
The cases weren't pure enough to burn without being thrown into the surface of the sun (may not be 100% true).

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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by NoMoreNicksLeft · 2004-10-19 02:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

Both good examples, but you missed one. Mac OSX.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by jvj24601 · 2004-10-19 02:14 · Score: 1

Mathematica was not developed on a NeXT. I used version 1.2 in 1989 on a Macintosh SE. Wolfram Research (the company that develops and sells Mathematica) was founded in 1988.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by jbrasch · 2004-10-19 02:20 · Score: 1

Jonathan Schwartz was (owned/president ?) of Lighthouse Design an isv that provided an office suite for NextStep. They were very sweet apps.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Ilgaz · 2004-10-19 02:21 · Score: 1

I know lots of people designing their own .nib files on OS X and using them as replacing the original .nib files.

I don't know how it becomes "hard" while end users (not developers) does use nib editors.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:24 · Score: 1, Interesting

NeXTStep was really popular in the financial industries. Also, ISTR that one of the first clustering -things- for desktops (Godzilla?) was done on NeXT.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by DrXym · 2004-10-19 02:40 · Score: 3, Insightful

Don't be facetious. Any programmer unfamiliar with the interface builder would sit there boggling at the screen for minutes in total incomprehension. I've used all kinds of UI development tools over the years running the gamut from horrible to sublime. XCode definitely falls near the bottom. Certainly not as bad as trying to visually design a Swing app but close.
Interface builder is not intuitive, it's not even discoverable. Joining objects residing in two separate windows with lines doesn't even make sense from a usability perspective. Even when you eventually figure out how to create classes and join them up to buttons, it is non-obvious how that maps onto actual code. On top of these problems you have to learn a new language just to be able to get your UI to do anything. If the documentation & help system were up to snuff it might shorten the learning curve but they're not - it takes seconds to do a search on MSDN, so why does it takes minutes on OS X?
Thus, the new programmer is faced with an unfamiliar language, an unfamiliar metaphor for UI building, and an unfamiliar framework with bad documentation. I haven't seen such an uncompromising and steep learning curve for a long time. And all that to programme a supposedly user friendly OS.
So yes I do think it is non obvious. In my case it was the first time I actually had to buy a book ("Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X") before I could even figure out what was happening. I haven't seen XCode 2.0 it has to be said, but I sure hope they intend to make it easier to use. Even a few wizards with common design patterns might help somewhat.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by bnenning · 2004-10-19 02:51 · Score: 3, Interesting

Most OS X apps use Cocoa & Objective-C for their front-end.

Or Carbon and C/C++.

That's not to say I don't think Objective-C is elegant but I'd still prefer C++

No, you really wouldn't. C++ just doesn't have the dynamic capabilities that Cocoa apps exploit to substantially reduce code. Simple example: given an arbitrary object, determine if it implements a named method. One line of code in ObjC, and this allows Cocoa apps to automatically enable and disable menu items depending on what actions are valid for the current selection.

--
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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by rainwadj · 2004-10-19 02:59 · Score: 1

Objective C is mostly C, with some OOP extensions added in. Sure, the syntax for accessing methods within objects is different, but it's not that much of a leap. OOP concepts can be difficult to get your head around, so just poking around Interface Builder without a formal introduction probably isn't the best approach. But, after wading in with a tutorial or two, it may 'click' with some people. Others may require a book on Cocoa, but even that doesn't seem too unreasonable.

--

A computer without Windows is like a cake without mustard.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:00 · Score: 0

Hey, whatever, I guess there's always a need for another ditch digger in the world.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by DavidLeblond · 2004-10-19 03:02 · Score: 1

Maybe I just had a different experience learning it... it made more sense to me than .NET's GUI (I still don't like the idea of GUI and code living together, they should be separate.)

I admit that Objective-C can be slightly painful especially when you get stuff that looks like

[[[[object message] message] message] message]

it rubbed me the wrong way at first but now I can honestly say I'd rather code in XCode than Visual Studio.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:10 · Score: 0

Yeah, and IIRC they also used wrote the original Quake map editor for OpenStep or something.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by FuzzieNorn · 2004-10-19 03:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

Xcode 2 does fix the documentation/help system. And, yes, Xcode does take a bit of getting used to, but you certainly don't have to buy a *book*. Just reading the online tutorial, which just consists of a few pages of text, was more than enough to get me to understand everything except the language (and you can't possibly call an unfamiliar language a problem with Xcode, any new language is going to be unfamiliar, shock).
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Cobalt+Jacket · 2004-10-19 03:14 · Score: 2, Interesting

A lot of proprietary systems were developed on it. The CIA had (not sure if they still do) a lot of NeXTstep apps. And First Chicago (now J.P. Morgan) developed a lot of their internal systems using NeXTstep. That stuff is still around in various forms.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:14 · Score: 0

I've been around computers a long time and i've never heard of it.

ok, you are stupid.

NEXT has been a big part of computing outside the toys called home computers.

you have been around toys a long time.

let me know when you have had some Sun,SGI and other real machines under your belt.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:23 · Score: 0

Any programmer unfamiliar with the interface builder would sit there boggling at the screen for minutes in total incomprehension.

(a) Any programmer unfamiliar with any complex development environment would sit there boggling for at least a few minutes.
(b) Who cares? Even if you're boggling for a few minutes, it really doesn't take that long to learn.

Interface builder is not intuitive, it's not even discoverable. Joining objects residing in two separate windows with lines doesn't even make sense from a usability perspective.

Why not? It's easy and works fine.

Even when you eventually figure out how to create classes and join them up to buttons, it is non-obvious how that maps onto actual code.

It's pretty obvious: the message that you wire it to send in Interface Builder is the one that gets sent, to the object it was wired to. This is not hard.

Thus, the new programmer is faced with an unfamiliar language, an unfamiliar metaphor for UI building, and an unfamiliar framework with bad documentation.

Oh boo hoo. Do you have a complaint other than it's new and therefore unfamiliar? I taught myself how to create apps with Interface Builder in a few days, out of just the online book. It's remarkably simple and a lot easier to use than most of the alternatives I've tried. (It's certainly a lot better than godforsaken code-generating excuses for interface builders.)
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by namekuseijin · 2004-10-19 03:40 · Score: 1

10th anniversary of something that barely anyone has ever used (in the big scheme of things) is really not any great thing to celebrate...

Stoopid

So i guess we should'n celebrate that magic year of 1969 or something when Doug Engelbart showed the world (actually, just a few people in a room) the mouse, huh? After all, how many people actually used that damn thing??!

Likewise, not many people used NeXT: they were very expensive and way ahead of their time. But still, you can see their shadow now in MacOS X and the GNUStep environment. Oh, and let's not forget one of the sweetest programming languages around: the highly dynamic Objective-C.

stoopid

--
I don't feel like it...
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:42 · Score: 0

One line of code in ObjC, and this allows Cocoa apps to automatically enable and disable menu items depending on what actions are valid for the current selection.

OMG! Just like, er, every other system since 1984...
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:43 · Score: 1, Interesting

You can see some pictures of how NeXT systems were used during the development of Doom and Quake at John Romero's site (here and here)
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Refrag · 2004-10-19 03:48 · Score: 1

The first web server was also developed and run on the same Next.

--
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Lars+T. · 2004-10-19 03:50 · Score: 3, Funny

Nothing like posting a web page as proof - that debunks your little story.
With these test shots out of the way, we started to think about burning the cube itself. When I had called NeXT to find out what kind of paint they had used to paint the cube, one of the people I had spoken with told me that the cube was made out of "magnesium alloy which is specially designed to be difficult to ignite." These words came back to me as I stood in front of the burn chamber at Livermore. What if we couldn't get the cube to ignite? The idea stood out in my mind like a sore thumb.
[...]
We put the rear panel into the burn chamber. The panel is a square piece of metal, 14'' on each side, and roughly half an inch thick. We stood it on end with a pair of bricks. Then we hit it with the MAP gas tource.
Nothing happened.
We kept the torch focused on the rear panel. Slowly it heated up in the spot where the flame lapped. Soon the metal started to melt. Then it puffed up with a white, caky ash.
"What's going on?" somebody asked.
We kept the flame on the spot. After another minute, we saw that same telltale white spark. "It's caught!" somebody said. The person holding the torch backed away.
The flame sputtered for a few seconds, then it went out. Something was clearly wrong.
We tried again with the MAP gas torch, with similar results. "We have problems like this all of the time," Kirk said, trying to reassure me. "Sometimes its really hard to get things burning." He then walked over to a storage shed and wheeled back an oxygen-acetylene torch. "This should set it on fire," he said with a gleam in his eyes.
The acetylene torch bruned a lot brighter than the MAP gas, but the results were similar. The back panel glowed red, burned white, sputtered a little, then went, leaving a caky white residue --- and a hole.
"This is so NeXT," I told Sally. "Everything works great in the tests, then when you try to make it work for real, in the field, nothing works. They build a computer out of magnesium, and it doesn't even burn!"

--
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:50 · Score: 0

Er. Commercial Lisp Machines were the "first wholescale industrial use of OOP practices", if anything.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:55 · Score: 0

You're not understanding are you?
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:57 · Score: 0

DOOM was mainly known for its high-performance SVGA graphics, which has nothing at all to do with NeXT hardware.

No it wasn't. Doom didn't even have SVGA graphics. It ran in VGA. 256 colors, 320x200 (or x240, don't remember if they used mode X).
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:57 · Score: 0

> Mathematica was not developed on a NeXT. I used version 1.2 in 1989 on a Macintosh SE. Wolfram Research (the company that develops and sells Mathematica) was founded in 1988.

Mathematica 1.0 was bundled with NeXTstep in 1988.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:58 · Score: 1, Interesting

Zilla.app. It lives on in spirit as Zillion.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by DrXym · 2004-10-19 04:00 · Score: 1

Oh I got used to it alright, it was just that first week. I experienced a sense of elation when I finally got something going in it. It's not so much a learning curve as a brick wall. I don't think there is anything intractably bad about Cocoa+XCode, it's just that the tools are not as good as they could be.

It's hard to say what environment I'm most comfortable with. It's probably VC98 because it's so uncluttered yet practical. I'm also partial to Eclipse, but the visual editing component (VE) has some way to go. A major hurdle for Java coding is that Swing has evil layout model making bloody difficult to visually design anything. Microsoft has the right idea there - ship an XY model first and stick the box / grid etc models in later.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:07 · Score: 0

Mathematica was first developed on the Macintosh, but Steve Jobs gave it its name.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:21 · Score: 0

Ok your stupid, Next paved the way for OO frameworks, web browsers, it pretty much defined the modern GUI. Jeez, I live in a Windows world and I even have heard of Next, you must be living in some sort of hole.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Theatetus · 2004-10-19 05:01 · Score: 1

The first wholescale industrial use of OOP practices?

*cough* AutoCAD *cough*

Come to think of it, any of the '70s & '80s commercial LISP environments, not to mention SmallTalk.

And anyways, "the first wholesale industrial use of OOP practices" isn't a result to brag about, it's just a practice.

--
All's true that is mistrusted
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Altus · 2004-10-19 05:31 · Score: 2, Interesting

all of the internal tool and editors that produced the content were developed using Objective-C and openstep.

--
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:37 · Score: 0

Your are not stupid, you're correct.

a development framework that hasn't needed significant modification for 10 years

That's not because it's stable, etc. It's because nobody uses it.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by roard · 2004-10-19 05:41 · Score: 1

"a development framework that hasn't needed significant modification for 10 years"
That's not because it's stable, etc. It's because nobody uses it.
Tell that to Cocoa developers on Mac... check facts the next time.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Kplusplus · 2004-10-19 06:26 · Score: 2, Insightful

I have to admit that I did the same when I first launched Interface Builder, but guess what I opened the help and it told of connecting objects to code and I was done, I understood.

You seem to speak ill of IB because its not like everything else you used, you seem unable to realize that this is a GOOD thing, a strength, not a weakness. Interface Builder doesn't generate crappy code for you, instead it generates real objects that are instantiated at runtime then bound to your code. Show me a pre-existing GUI designer that does that and then your point makes sense.

Interface Builder is unilke everything you have ever seen in every way, but every way is better. There is no craapy code generated, there is no retarded boxes nor grids to lay things out with, but instead struts that decide the resizeMask of widgets, and almost all the setting can be made in IB, much more powerful than all teh other GUI editors, and so much easier once you udnerstand.

Unfamiliar framework, yes, bad documentation, no. I mean come on, its new to you so your not familiar with its ins and outs, but just because it doesn't do something like API or library foo doesn't mean it is somehow limited. The docs and the API itself has a clear seperation of tasks and responsibilities, all you need to do is glance through the API docs, or if thats not clear enough for you, start at the Conceptual Docs that explain things without introducing the code involved in detail.

Also as to searching the OS X developer resources, your not doing it right, since the ADC library consolidation makes looking up info generally work the first time and finds exactly what I was looking for when I search not related documents, or documents that will lead me to teh answet, but th answer itself.

The language, lets not cry foul there either, ObjC is blindingly simple to learn if you already know C. It's a few extensions and a CLEAR way of handling objects. The entire reason for teh bracket syntax is to clearly dileaneate object interaction from just memory manipulations of other functions.

You bought a book to introduce you to something new that you didn't know and had to learn, what is surprising about this? Some buy books, some read example code, some just get it. No shame in not understanding, seeking out the knowledge doesn't hurt anyone.

--
-"I'm one of those Mac people that will break a bottle on the bar and hold it to your throat for bad-mouthing my system"
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Brett+Johnson · 2004-10-19 06:45 · Score: 2, Insightful

The NeXTstep and OpenStep APIs are extremely well designed. The are both comprehensive and consistent. Even as new "kits" (now call frameworks) were created, they shared a great deal of consistency with existing frameworks.

The quality of the designs are evident in the very small number of frameworks that needed to be modified in an incompatible way or completely replaced. (The inadequately designed DBKit being replaced by EOF comes to mind.)

When I compare these attributes to Sun's highly inconsistent Java APIs and Microsoft's frequent replacement of frameworks with a completely different "improved yet incompatible" API, I just groan. Even though Sun and NeXT had a relationship, I couldn't figure out why Sun didn't copy some of NeXT's obviously better designs for its own Java frameworks.

I used the high quality, ease of use, and consistency of the NeXTstep/OpenStep APIs as examples that help me significantly improve my own OO design skills.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 07:05 · Score: 0

You are stupid.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by taweili · 2004-10-19 07:27 · Score: 1

Well, how about DOOM?! It's well known that John Carmack developed the first version of DOOM on NeXTSTEP.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by taweili · 2004-10-19 07:29 · Score: 1

Agree. I do miss all the Lighthouse apps!!! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/22/suns_macos _x_suite/
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by kyle_r_b · 2004-10-19 07:40 · Score: 1

Ever heard of Mac OS X? Almost all new Mac applications use the Cocoa framework which is essentially identical to GnuStep.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 08:03 · Score: 0

NeXT was headed by Steve Jobs at the time. Apple computers merged with NeXT computers, thus bringing Jobs back to Apple.

Jobs was CEO of the old company, and became the CEO of the new company. In other words, Apple did not acquire NeXT, but rather, NeXT acquired Apple, and retained the Apple(r) name.

at least IMHO
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by losinggeneration · 2004-10-19 09:15 · Score: 1

Don't forget Quake I (if I remember correctly)
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Z4rd0Z · 2004-10-19 09:32 · Score: 1

Interface Builder doesn't generate crappy code for you, instead it generates real objects that are instantiated at runtime then bound to your code.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but can you explain how generating real objects is different from generating code? It seems that in order to generate objects it would have to generate code in some way, but I'm probably just not understanding.

--
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 10:00 · Score: 0

Just pointing this out, but "really well" and "really easily" are two wholely different statements. Any magnesium-based alloy will burn "really well".
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 11:59 · Score: 0

It's ObjC you can describe an object and then instantiate that, you can construct objects on the fly, redirect methods, add instance variables at run-time, load classes lazily, substitute entire classes for others, bla bla bla.

ObjC is the most dynamic C based language out there and stuff like what I mentioned above is very easy to do in it.

But IB creates XML files of the objects created, their instance and configuration, and GUI layout, and those are all created for you and linked to your code through the NSNibLoading class.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by EdHead2003 · 2004-10-19 12:02 · Score: 1

That first sentence is a genuinely surprising statement. When you say you've 'been around computers for a long time' do you mean you've had one sat on a desk quite near you for a long time?
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Z4rd0Z · 2004-10-19 12:23 · Score: 1

In a way though, isn't creating an XML file of an object code generation?

--
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by GrahamCox · 2004-10-19 12:34 · Score: 1

As a Cocoa programmer, I agree with your observations, but the solution is - look it up and learn it. These tools are not aimed at end-users as such, they are aimed at tech-savvy guys like us. Objective C took me oh, about an hour to learn and use productively, moving from C++, and frankly, its simplicity was a breath of fresh air compared to all the stuff you need to do to keep C++ happy. IB is a bit weird with all those connecting lines n stuff, but again, once you "get it" (a few hours investment, tops) it makes sense and works pretty well. The real key comes with coding using the Cocoa library - it's just so incredibly productive. I don't believe I've ever seen a faster method for getting apps from concept to desktop.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by BorgCopyeditor · 2004-10-19 12:52 · Score: 1

It is, of course, but I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say you will never have to deal with it as code, the way you would with say, the nasty auto-generated Swing code of Netbeans or some such. If you double-click a .nib file, Interface Builder will be launched, giving you a direct, visual, and wholly intuitive (while still configurable and powerful) representation of the app's windows, menus, etc. In fact, what the objects you see on screen just are the actual objects your program will use.
On a side note, this came in handy when OS X's Terminal app didn't seem to give me the option to configure its appearance as I wanted; I just located its .nib file, opened it with IB, made and saved the changes I wanted, and voila!

--
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Z4rd0Z · 2004-10-19 14:14 · Score: 1

Neato.

--
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by TheInternet · 2004-10-19 21:12 · Score: 1

A 10th anniversary of something that barely anyone has ever used (in the big scheme of things) is really not any great thing to celebrate

Aside from the fact that it's the predecessor to Cocoa, OpenStep is what Sun based Java on. And since Java birthed .Net, and .Net birthed Mono, figure many modern OO platforms owe their existence to OpenStep.

- Scott

--
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by David+Leppik · 2004-10-22 06:23 · Score: 1
Microsoft has the right idea there - ship an XY model first and stick the box / grid etc models in later.

I've been fighting with apps written on an XY model for far too long to let this pass. Sure, they work if you get the fonts, font sizes, non-scrollable window sizes, etc. right the first time for everybody and for ever and ever. But that never happens. You have:
- Font substitution when you don't happen to have the requested font, should you be using a non-system font. This is especially important on X-Windows.
- Users who change the default fonts and font sizes, should you be using a system font. Usually making the fonts huge to reduce eyestrain. Especially as you get higher and higer resolution monitors.
- OS vendors who change system fonts and font sizes because pixels are getting smaller.
  There's a reason why Microsoft wants to move to Avalon.
- Portability. Ever used a Java applet on a Mac? the Mac uses a different default point-to-pixel conversion than Windows, and its widgets are bigger than in Windows. As a result, a lot of applets end up with forms where half the buttons are missing because the frame is too small--and it can't be resized.
- Resizing. A few jobs back I was developing Java servlets on Linux, Windows NT, and Solaris. We had to set environment variables (e.g. CLASSPATH). In Windows, this involved typing a 1000-character string into a 20-character field while navigating through about 10 tabs in a window with room for about 4 tabs. You couldn't resize the window, and everything was much smaller than it should have been. Granted, you can do resizing with an XY model, but people rarely bother. With other models, you get usable default resizing for free.
Frankly, unless you're doing an embedded system, XY models are wrong for just about anything. And even with embedded systems you need to make sure you have the right resolution display for ever and ever-- Palm's transition to higher resolution displays isn't as clean as I would like.

Re:Sorry. by uid100 · 2004-10-19 01:45 · Score: 2, Interesting

Why is it ugly?
What's wrong with programming with a standard?
Doesn't it make sense to write once - compile anywhere?

--
...yup...

The magic 10? by Just+Some+Guy · 2004-10-19 01:46 · Score: 1, Funny

The magic 10 appears in GNUstep's current 1.10.x release

I'm skeptical, but I guess that's possible.

and in Apple's Mac OS X 'Cocoa' release.

Um, sure. Last year I opened an app that ran in MacOS 9, named in homage to OpenStep's ninth birthday and the fact that OS X would finish making it completely obsolete. Apple must've been smoking crack when they released System 7 to honor OpenStep's minus-third birthday.

--
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?

Another French pioneer... by mirko · 2004-10-19 01:47 · Score: 4, Informative

Kudos to Jean-Marie Hullot, who contributed to this by designing "Interface Builder" !

--
Trolling using another account since 2005.

What is the point? by CodeYoddler · 2004-10-19 01:48 · Score: 0

What is the point of coding in a standard to compile everywhere when you can just code on the platform that has 95% of the market. It is the same thing for games.

--
http://codeus.info

Re:What is the point? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 01:50 · Score: 0

Which is exactly what most developers (who want to make money) do.
Re:What is the point? by Patrik_AKA_RedX · 2004-10-19 01:57 · Score: 1

Getting 5% of the market is still a big piece of the pie for a small developer.
Re:What is the point? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:12 · Score: 0

Towards the end, 99% of OpenStep deployments were on Win32. People used it because they liked it as Windows development environment.
Re:What is the point? by ViolentGreen · 2004-10-19 02:15 · Score: 1

Getting 5% of the market is still a big piece of the pie for a small developer.

They aren't getting 5% of the market. No matter what they do, not all of their target audience will use the product.

Assume that you expect 20% (being generous) of the users in your target audience to use your product. Do it in Windows and have 19% of the total market or have 1% of the total market. It's not a hard choice.

--
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Re:What is the point? by OmniVector · 2004-10-19 02:45 · Score: 1

what some fail to consider is that many don't do it for the money, but rather the simple enjoyment of the environment. hard to imagine that there's something more pleasant to develop for than windows is it?

--
- tristan
Re:What is the point? by BasilBrush · 2004-10-19 02:48 · Score: 1

You missed out the part about having more competition if you program for Windows. Being a big fish in a small pool can often bring in more money than being a small fish in a big pool.
Re:What is the point? by ViolentGreen · 2004-10-19 03:22 · Score: 1

That's true but money wasn't mentioned anywhere. The original poster was talking about getting a 5% marketshare. I just expanded on that.

--
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Re:What is the point? by Enzo90910 · 2004-10-19 03:37 · Score: 1

Well, of course, to code for your personal machine in the best framework available. Who cares about 95% of the market? They are just 'other people'.

--
I don't have much to add.
Re:What is the point? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:10 · Score: 0

You could get 95% with .NET, which is also easy to use, lets you code in any language, and provides a very up-to-date standard library with classes for almost any task you'd like to have. Make that closer to 99% when Mono becomes more commonly used.

Or, you could use Java, which is not as nice and forces you to program in Java or some unofficial language like Jython, but provides a similarly nice class library and ease of development.

Frankly I don't believe that there's any future for "write once, compile everywhere" when you can "write once, run everywhere" with just-in-time or HotSpot compilation. Being able to resolve dependencies at runtime rather than compile-time makes it easier to provide updates for various libraries, without having to deal with .so's, .dll's, or whatever the platform's mechanism of choice is. It also lets you use truly object-oriented libraries rather than having some structures and functions defined in a header file. And this helps speed up development and encourages reuse, which is very important especially for open-source projects.

What's NeXT? by mrchapp · 2004-10-19 01:48 · Score: 4, Interesting

Looking back at my old NeXT (we never lose a chance to brag about having one) makes me wonder what's coming in the next 10 years, and how much of that will arrive from Steve Jobs' hand.

Re:What's NeXT? by CodeWanker · 2004-10-19 02:01 · Score: 2, Funny

And there's another advantage: job security. If you can port an existing mission critical system to this or develop a new on with this, you've got a real hostage :)

--

"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
Re:What's NeXT? by jedaustin · 2004-10-19 03:45 · Score: 1

I still have an old NeXT color station.
I've held out giving/throwing it away for years on the prospect that Linux or BSD would eventually have an OS that worked on it without netbooting.

I still remember the day I brought it home...
I got it used from a friend and set it up in my living room. Way ahead of it's time. Too bad nothing modern runs on it without booting from another machine :(

Hey Apple.. It's 1992 technology; release the damn specs already so they can finish a version of Linux!

JD
Re:What's NeXT? by jeif1k · 2004-10-19 03:55 · Score: 1
Let's look at history:
- NeXT kernel--from CMU
- ObjC--from StepStone (indirectly from PARC)
- Postscript--from Adobe (indirectly from PARC)
- WIMP--from Alan Kay and PARC
- library architecture--from Smalltalk 80
Jobs did a great job selecting, integrating, and marketing. But what did he or his companies actually invent?
Re:What's NeXT? by trudyscousin · 2004-10-19 05:25 · Score: 1

"But what did he or his companies actually invent?"

Invariably, something greater than the sum of its parts.

--
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Re:What's NeXT? by BorgCopyeditor · 2004-10-19 13:00 · Score: 1

Umm, Cocoa is not Smalltalk 80, and Quartz is not Postscript. And don't forget CoreAudio, which is truly awesome. Anyway, that's my $0.02.

--
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Re:What's NeXT? by Rysc · 2004-10-20 09:30 · Score: 1

...quartz is PDF. Oops.

--
I want my Cowboyneal
Re:What's NeXT? by BorgCopyeditor · 2004-10-20 09:52 · Score: 1

I didn't realize that PDF was a full-featured composited windowing system.

--
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Re:What's NeXT? by Rysc · 2004-10-20 11:43 · Score: 1

I did not realize that postscript was, either.

No, I am not going to turn sarcasm off. Me likes it on.

--
I want my Cowboyneal
Re:What's NeXT? by BorgCopyeditor · 2004-10-20 12:00 · Score: 1

I did not realize that postscript was, either.
Ack! I finally get it.

--
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.

to understand this in context by minus_273 · 2004-10-19 01:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

consider that tin burns lee when developing the www and the original browser gave up on his old projects and got a next box becasue the development of the UI and software was so easy on it. I wonder what would have have happened hsd he not gotten it :).
On a side note, it is really quite sad the linux developers are not using/updating openstep. The fact that it is nearly completely compatible with OSX's Cocoa is a huge plus. I discovered this while developing software in Cocoa and have often thought about how cool it would be to have a GL based desktop with a slick Openstep ui ( the current one looks like it is stuck in 1993) on linux.. Then I got a Mac

--
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace

Re:to understand this in context by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 01:54 · Score: 0

Once again, please cite a source for the information in your .sig.
Re:to understand this in context by Ilgaz · 2004-10-19 02:26 · Score: 1

From pure end user view who used Linux for 1 year on his x86...

I guess gnome and kde to blame.

I used windowmaker as default for 1 year but desktop inconsistency made me mad. Run a gnome app (gtk, whatever) you get gnome widgets, run a qt app (read:kde), you get KDE app..

Now I use OS X on my G5, back to NexT environment which is real unique just like poor old OS/2 workspace...

Aka no Start menu for Gods sake... :)
Re:to understand this in context by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:34 · Score: 0

I agree, a co-worker of mine is Nepalese (and just came back from a trip to Kathmandu) and he is as baffled as me.

I guess he could be blaming Amnesty International for the Maoist Insurgency, but that makes no sense.
Re:to understand this in context by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:38 · Score: 0

...and that would be closer to 2500-3000 people. I really don't know what he is talking about. He's just asking for a libel suit if he doesn't provide some justification.
Re:to understand this in context by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:52 · Score: 0

He's posted about it before. He's royalty or somehow related to the powers that be.
Re:to understand this in context by jeif1k · 2004-10-19 03:47 · Score: 1

Maybe it's because Linux developers have other choices: PyGnome, wxPython, Java+SWT, Eclipse, ...
Re:to understand this in context by Seanasy · 2004-10-19 04:33 · Score: 1

On a side note, it is really quite sad the linux developers are not using/updating openstep.
They are. It's called GNUStep. They could use more help, though.
Re:to understand this in context by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:10 · Score: 0

There is a good reason for that:

Objective-C. Yeeccchh.
Re:to understand this in context by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 06:37 · Score: 0

Current death toll from Amnesty International's actions in Nepal: 9570

WTF?!? Are you smoking crack? The Maoists haven't even killed that many people. You may disagree with Amnesty, but that claim is madness.
Re:to understand this in context by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 07:32 · Score: 0

Eh? Would you care to explain your signature? How on earth could you consider Amnesty to be killing people?
Re:to understand this in context by minus_273 · 2004-10-19 07:44 · Score: 1

To show how dumb slashdot readers are i suggest this link. Next time, if you dont know what you are talking about dont bother typing. I dunno even the BBC says 9500 dead. Of course, you are posing as AC, so that says a lot.

--
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Re:to understand this in context by mrchaotica · 2004-10-19 12:13 · Score: 1

How is Amnesty International responsible for the Maoist insurgency?

Also, why'd you remove your sig?

--
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Re:to understand this in context by minus_273 · 2004-10-20 01:45 · Score: 1

I haven't removed my sig. You can get the gory details of everything if you search the BBC since it spans the events of the last 8 years.

If you want just the jist of the story look at my journal entry since this is offtopic. Looking at some of the comments that are posted here, it is easy to see how far downhill slashdot has gone. The hatemail i get for my sig is even worse. I try not to reply to anyone who posts as AC.
As fro who i am, well, my village is a no go area now and i've seen way to many people die.

--
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Re:to understand this in context by mrchaotica · 2004-10-20 07:05 · Score: 1

Oh, ok. For some reason the sig didn't display on your last post.

Anyway, that's interesting to know! I've got a suggestion: link to your journal entry in your sig, and link to those BBC articles in your journal. That way people will stop accusing you of making stuff up.

--
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

There was never anything so consistent, stable.... by WillAdams · 2004-10-19 01:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

and productive out of the box as NeXTstep (says the guy who still uses a NeXT Cube as his main production machine at home).

- Command= in any app to get a definition in Webster.app rocks
- having all of your man pages, the sysadmin refs, and the works of Will Shakespeare and anything else you wish to add in Digital Librarian ensures one can look up what one needs at will.
- Being able to improve the functionality of _any_ app by installing a Service or an app which provides a Service provides a synergy one doesn't get in Mac OS X where it's hit-or-miss whether or no an app supports Services (Cocoa apps do, Carbon and Java apps have to be specially coded)
- having total control over the screen (you can drag off-screen and hide all but one pixel of the vertical menu, one tile of the Dock)
- The vertical menu makes tear-off sub-menus make sense, which allows effortless customization of one's working environment for a given task w/o inscrutable toolbars
- the pop-up menu means that the menu for the current app is always instantly available --- some commands can even become gestural in one's access to them, e.g., ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuso, right-button-menu click, down a bit and straight over and release

I could go on, and I have, check my rants on groups.google.com in comp.sys.next/mac.advocacy

I've got a little bit more on my site, http://members.aol.com/willadams look for my nascent gnustep pages, or the NeXT brochure in my portfolio

Or of course, visit http://www.gnustep.org or http://www.stepwise.com for some good programming info

William

--
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Sounds great!! by Qwavel · 2004-10-19 01:53 · Score: 1, Funny

Except for that big about the hurdles getting it to work on Windows. You will forgive me for suggesting that how well it works on Windows, where 95% of users are, is really important.

Also, since you are talking about GNUstep as one of the creators of this, I assume this is open source?

And finally, is is language agnostic? I personally would want to use C++.

Yes, I did not RTFA. Sorry.

Re:Sounds great!! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:19 · Score: 2, Informative

GNUStep's version of the Foundation Kit (basic non-GUI classes) works great on Windows. I've used it to port MacOS X code with much success.

GNUStep's version of the Application Kit (GUI classes) is still pretty much unusable on Windows. Even if it were usuable, it's insistence on being a holistic "environment" with various services running, rather than just an API, is annoying.

No, it's not language agnostic. You'll need to use objective-c, or some other langauge like python that can bridge to objective-c easily.

-Helpful AC
Re:Sounds great!! by bnenning · 2004-10-19 02:57 · Score: 1

Also, since you are talking about GNUstep as one of the creators of this, I assume this is open source?

GNUstep is LGPL.

And finally, is is language agnostic?

Sort of. There are bindings available for many languages such as Perl, Python, and Ruby. C++ won't work because it doesn't have the necessary dynamic and introspective capabilities.

--
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Re:Sounds great!! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:18 · Score: 0

Windows. You will forgive me for suggesting that how well it works on Windows, where 95% of users are, is really important.

you keep using that word "users". I do not think you know what it means.

the 95% that sit there and drool and simply click on purdy buttons are NOT users.

users actually do something with their computer, everyone else are appliance operators.
Re:Sounds great!! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:31 · Score: 0

GNUstep is not the same thing as NextSTEP. The original poster might as well have said "today is the 10th anniversary of the web browser" and linked to the IE6 download page. There was no FA to R.
Re:Sounds great!! by GrahamCox · 2004-10-19 12:41 · Score: 1

I personally would want to use C++
Well, you can. But as a C++ guy myself, I recently had a major eye-opening experience going to Objective-C with Cocoa. It's a fraction of the size of C++, yet unquantifiably more powerful. I've seen the light, brother! I really think that the C++ language dropped the ball on this one. Do yourself a favour and spend a day or two seriously looking at Cocoa. Just the dynamic method lookup alone makes C++ look strangely inflexible in comparison.

Some links about OpenStep/GNUstep/Cocoa .. by roard · 2004-10-19 01:53 · Score: 3, Informative

Some GNUstep links:

Other links, Objective-C and Apple Cocoa

portability by _|()|\| · 2004-10-19 01:54 · Score: 2, Interesting

It's not their fault, but GNUstep isn't exactly ubiquitous, so it's not a shoo-in for Unix development. After spending some time with the Xcode tutorials, I was eager to try Objective C on Linux. I then realized that a lot of what was cool about ObjC was in the foundation framework, which was part of GNUstep. Since this wasn't packaged for either of my readily available distributions (SuSE and Red Hat), I built it from source, which was routine, but non trivial.

After GNUstep was finally installed, it took a few trips to Google to figure out how to actually compile a program. It turns out that GCC for OS X has some options that are not present on Linux, such as (IIRC) -framework. The other problem had something to do with having to add code to enable garbage collection.

The final annoyance I encountered, before moving on to other projects, was the lack of autoconf support for Objective C. Again, it's not their fault, but ObjC/*Step feels like a second-class development environment on Linux.

Re:portability by aminorex · 2004-10-19 03:59 · Score: 1

> lack of autoconf support

And this is a negative, how? Autoconf/automake create a sucking sound that threatens the doppler shifting of galaxies. Anything that helps you escape from their grip is a good thing.

--
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Re:portability by Abcd1234 · 2004-10-19 05:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

I built it from source, which was routine, but non trivial.

Well, my first question is, what was non-trivial about it? You download four packages (gnustep-make, gnustep-base, gnustep-gui, gnustep-backend) and build them (in the order I listed them) just like any other application. Then, just source $GNUSTEP_ROOT/System/Makesfiles/GNUstep.sh in your .bashrc and you're all set to go. Any other GNUstep apps you wish to build are a simple untar and "make && make install".

It turns out that GCC for OS X has some options that are not present on Linux, such as (IIRC) -framework.

Yes, there are some issues with OSX compatibility (in particular, the "import" versus "include + ifdefs" issue), but they're fairly easy to work around (just ask the GNUmail folks). (BTW, the answer is "include + ifdefs", if you want your code to be portable. :)

And as for garbage collection, GC in GNUstep is still experimental, AFAIK, and isn't really necessary (though very convenient). The OpenStep way is to use NSAutoreleasePools and the related retain: release: and autorelease: messages in NSObject itself. It's an odd paradigm to get used to, but once you understand it, it works fairly well (aside from it using straight reference counting which, as well all know, breaks in the face of circular dependencies).

The final annoyance I encountered, before moving on to other projects, was the lack of autoconf support for Objective C.

Why, dear god, would you ever *want* autoconf support? The whole point of the Makefiles package is to take care of all your build requirements for you. All you have to do is create a simple Makefile for your project, and voila, the system does everything else for you. All you have to do is a basic "make && make install" to build and install your package. Frankly, I consider this a *far* superior solution to the mess that is autoconf. The fact is, autoconf has no place in the world of GNUstep (other than to, of course, build some of the GNUstep packages, themselves, before the Makfiles package is available)... and it's a better world as a result.
Re:portability by roard · 2004-10-19 05:36 · Score: 2, Informative

Actually, the "import" versus "include + ifdefs" is not a problem. It's not even really a GNUstep problem -- more a gcc one. At one point, they deprecated the "import" (but the support was still there..). Now, the "import" is no more deprecated in the current gcc. So... if you want to use import, go on, it works with the apple gcc and the fsf gcc..
The automatic garbage collection support (using boehm library) in GNUstep is, afaik, only available for -base (Foundation), not -gui (AppKit), although I could be wrong. I must confess that I never tried it, as the retain/release/autorelease garbage collector scheme works well enough (and is very flexible) as soon as you understand it (a very good article about it is this one).
Re:portability by Abcd1234 · 2004-10-19 05:37 · Score: 1

Ahh, I wasn't aware that they came to their senses and "undeprecated" import. Thank gawd... apparently, I need to upgrade my Objective-C compiler, though. :)
Re:portability by mrchaotica · 2004-10-19 12:54 · Score: 1

what was non-trivial about it?
Perhaps he meant that the mere necessity of building from source is non-trivial? I know that I would consider it so -- I'm used to either drag-and-dropping (in MacOSX) or emerging (in Gentoo). I mean, I can install with make, but it's not as convenient as the other methods.

--
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

Colour me ignorant... by B5_geek · 2004-10-19 01:58 · Score: 1

...but isn't that what Java was supposed to do?

(Disclaimer: The most programming I have ever done was 10 line batch file. That gave you a few options.)

--
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)

Re:Colour me ignorant... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:06 · Score: 1, Informative

Java is Objective-C for the masses ... the good things of Java are taken from Objective-C / OpenStep. The bad things ... well they were added separately, or taken from C++.

It's a fact that the Java designers had Objective-C in mind. Many of them came straight from Objective-C.
Re:Colour me ignorant... by animaal · 2004-10-19 02:10 · Score: 1

Nope. NextStep is an API. This means that the calls you put into your source code should work regardless of what target platform you're compiling that code for. It helps keep the source code similar for your program to work on different operating systems. And reduces the need to learn a different API for each operating system. But you still need to recompile it for each targetted platform. And you may use other platform-specific APIs you'd need to change to make it work on other platforms.

Java aims to keep source code and compiled executable the same across platforms. I can write a java program on Windows, compile it, put it on a disk, bring the disk to a Solaris box, and run it there without any extra compiling.
Re:Colour me ignorant... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:10 · Score: 0

Wow, so what you're saying is:

1) You have no idea what ObjC is
2) You have no idea what Java is
3) You have no idea what C++ is
Re:Colour me ignorant... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:02 · Score: 0

Huh? The original poster was 100% correct. What are you talking about??
Re:Colour me ignorant... by tequesta · 2004-10-19 05:10 · Score: 1

NeXTStep integrated cross-compilers and stored cross-compiled executables as separate files in the same application bundle. So the effect was the same: Compile on one platform, distribute code that will run on all platforms running NeXTStep.

Only the way the effect was achieved was much cleaner than the messy VM stuff you need with Java.

Re:Write once run anywhere will *NEVER* happen by animaal · 2004-10-19 02:00 · Score: 2, Insightful

With leading-edge games like Doom3? You're right.
With device drivers? You're right again.

However, some class of applications can be written once and run anywhere. I've written enterprise apps on Linux that just ran fine the first time they were tried on Windows, Solaris, etc.

Technologies like Java, Python and Ruby make it real. And I'd bet that in the not-too-distant future, games for mobile devices will be "write once run anywhere". J2ME is a good stab at it, but I don't think it's quite there yet.

I'll be the 1st one to say *iirrk*, take it away by danalien · 2004-10-19 02:01 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Well, at least on linux/unix gnuStep/OpenStep looks awful.

as a KDE-biased user, I'd rather switch to GNOME, then one of *Em's* ... just head over to their Application Database and compare linux/unix screenshots of <which ever> versus Mac OS X ...

No one can (or should) deny that 'looks actually' matter(s) ... and I'll bet somehere actually does like the feel of gnuStep/OpenStep has on linux/unix ... but, I'm pretty certian not many KDE's or GNOMES do. *FSCK* my CLI looks/has a better feel then gnuStep/OpenStep :)

So what I'm saying, Ya' better redo those gnuStep/OpenStep widgets for linux/unix, if you'd want 'it must look *fancy* nice/good - before I will use it'--folks :)

--
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.

PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by Baldrson · 2004-10-19 02:06 · Score: 2, Interesting

Just shy of 8 years ago I was involved in a startup that was taking an insurance company paperless. Some developers who had been using NeXT since the first beta release of the black cube were there and decided to run a test of development environments. One was NeXTSTEP and the other was PARCPlace's Smalltalk environment. The test involved the same set of forms presented as paper to the developers, whose job it was to make those forms into computer applications updating a database. One developer useed PARCPlace's Smalltalk environment. The other used NeXTSTEP. PARCPlace's environment beat NeXTSTEP by better than a factor of 2.

--
Seastead this.

Re:PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:02 · Score: 0

PARCPlace's environment beat NeXTSTEP by better than a factor of 2.

Yes. In slowness.
Re:PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:51 · Score: 1, Insightful

I don't think the issue here should be Objective-C versus SmallTalk, because they really are two variants of the same flavour of OO language. The shame is that SmallTalk and Obj-C have been marginalized by the C++ approach to OO (with Java being a variant).

I highly encourage anyone who has a chance to try one of these languages out, as this can lead to some new ways of approaching your code.

In particular I am thinking about dynamic binding at runtime. How sweet.

Anyways, cheers to the OpenStep community, and may there always be diversity in programming paradigms.
Re:PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by jeif1k · 2004-10-19 05:28 · Score: 1

First of all, Objective-C is not Smalltalk--not even close. The C heritage of ObjC means you have to deal with pointers, type errors, casts, , compilers, header files, and all that.

Second, the ObjC object model is nothing unusual anymore: people can try it out much more easily using Python or Ruby. And with the bindings of those languages to grk, wx, and qt, people can do mainstream gui programming with languages and environments that are altogether a lot nicer without leaving linux or gnome.
Re:PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by argent · 2004-10-19 08:32 · Score: 1

I don't think the issue here should be Objective-C versus SmallTalk, because they really are two variants of the same flavour of OO language

Not quite. ObjectiveC requires the programmer to spend more effort handling memory management and distinguishes between objects and primitives.

Also, the typical Smalltalk class system seems much more orthogonal. ObjectiveC frameworks (including Cocoa, and I assume OpenStep) don't seem to really take advantage of the capabilities of dynamic classes... let's look at NSString, for example:
stringWithString stringWithCString stringWithCon tentsOfFile stringWithContentsOfURL
Why are these four separate methods with separate names? Why is "string" part of the method name? In Smalltalk, these would probably all be "toString" methods on the objects. If ObjectiveC was Smalltalk-like, you'd at least have something like this:
String with: <object>. String with: (<object> contents).
eg:
String with: ((File with: "name of file") contents).
This way the bookkeeping doesn't fall on the programmer, and common same idioms can be more widely used. Programming in ObjectiveC reminds me of programming in the OO-equivalent of Bliss, where you have to remember to explicitly dereference all your variables, or BCPL, where you have to use different operators on interger or floating point values.

It's still better than Java or C++, but lord there's a long way to go.
Re:PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by Abcd1234 · 2004-10-19 09:00 · Score: 1

Not quite. ObjectiveC requires the programmer to spend more effort handling memory management and distinguishes between objects and primitives.

OTOH, they are more similar than different. Weak encapsulation. Message passing as the model for object interaction. Dynamic binding. Incredible introspection capabilities. The list goes on. Basically, ObjC is as close to SmallTalk+C as you can possibly get.

Also, the typical Smalltalk class system seems much more orthogonal. ObjectiveC frameworks...

Bah, this entire section of your post isn't even about ObjectiveC "the language". All your issues are with the OpenStep APIs. Don't confuse the two. Agreed, the OpenStep has some oddities in it, and it's not *nearly* as nice as the standard SmallTalk object model, but that's not the fault of the language... you could create equally bad APIs in SmallTalk if you wanted to.
Re:PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by roard · 2004-10-19 09:11 · Score: 1

Not quite. ObjectiveC requires the programmer to spend more effort handling memory management and distinguishes between objects and primitives.
Yes and no... Yes, it needs a bit more effort than Smalltalk, but the reference counting garbage collector thingy is not really hard to use, and you mostly use autorelease anyway... and yes, you distinguishes between objects and primitives like int or float, because Objective-C is "just" an OOP superset of the C language. But if you want you can just use NSNumber ... quite similar to jave on that point of view. It's mostly a pragmatic decision.
Also, the typical Smalltalk class system seems much more orthogonal. ObjectiveC frameworks (including Cocoa, and I assume OpenStep) don't seem to really take advantage of the capabilities of dynamic classes... (...)
Uh ? theses four methods are here for convenient use. You can always initialize the NSString object using a NSData object..
(...) Why are these four separate methods with separate names? Why is "string" part of the method name? In Smalltalk, these would probably all be "toString" methods on the objects. If ObjectiveC was Smalltalk-like, you'd at least have something like this:
String with: <object>. String with: (<object> contents). String with: ((File with: "name of file") contents).

I really don't understand your example. How is it different than:
[String with: anObject]; [String with: [anObject content]]; [String with: [[File with: @"name of file"] contents]];

in Objective-C ?
just to show you, you can write your Smalltalk example like that:
(String with: <object>). (String with: (<object> contents)). (String with: ((File with: "name of file") contents)).

It's just that Smalltalk allow you to not use parenthesis when the interpreter can remove ambiguity, while it's necessary to use the brackets in Objective-C ...
The main difference between Smalltalk and Objective-C (apart that *everything is an object* in Smalltalk..) is the existence of blocks, that you don't have in Objective-C (hm, actually.. there are some implementations...). But blocks are obligatory in Smalltalk due to its OO-ness, while they are not in Objective-C as you can just reuse C construct (if/while/for ..).
Though I agree, blocks are extremely nice and that's generally something that Objective-C programmers would like gcc to include :-)
I am actually generally a fan of Smalltalk, but Objective-C is the closest thing you can find, and it has some nice things too. And the "image" approach of Smalltalk, while often nice, has also its problems. Although my dream development system would probably be Smalltalk+OpenStep (while keeping the possibility of using Objective-C code if needed for speed..).
There is actually a Squeak-Objective-C bridge that nearly works (it has a problem with delegates, mostly..), and that nicely send -release messages to objects automatically, using the Squeak GC... ;-)
Re:PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by argent · 2004-10-19 10:00 · Score: 1

Basically, ObjC is as close to SmallTalk+C as you can possibly get.

True, which is why I don't think C is a good basis for a Smalltalk-like language, and why I think there's more potential in what PARC wrought (potential, alas, wasted... the Smalltalk community makes the Balkans look unified).

All your issues are with the OpenStep APIs.

Almost true, and close enough, and I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear that I'm looking at ObjectiveC in the context of this thread comparing PARC's environment and NeXT's. Is it unreasonable to discuss OpenStep's APIs when talking about NeXTstep/OpenStep? I do think the stringFromString vs stringFromCString mess is hard to avoid in ObjectiveC, but I admit I'm not familiar with other OC frameworks. Is there one you can say (for example) something like ["C string" at: offset]?
Re:PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by argent · 2004-10-19 10:16 · Score: 1

I really don't understand your example. How is it different than:
[String with: anObject]; [String with: [anObject content]]; [String with: [[File with: @"name of file"] contents]];
in Objective-C ?

Hmmm...

I guess the difference is that the people who designed the class framework for NeXTstep/OpenStep/Cocoa should have spent some time using Smalltalk first.

I had, perhaps rashly, assumed that they had a good reason for the chaos and anarchy in NSthis and NSthat. Now I'm depressed.

But blocks are obligatory in Smalltalk due to its OO-ness, while they are not in Objective-C as you can just reuse C construct (if/while/for ..).

Which is why I don't think C or even just C syntax was a good place to start with ObjectiveC any more than it was with C++, Java, or Livescript.

Have you had a look at F-Script? It's the closest thing to Smalltalk+OpenStep that I've seen.
Re:PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 10:52 · Score: 0

F-Script is Smalltalk for Cocoa.
Re:PARCPlace's Environment Beat It by Abcd1234 · 2004-10-19 10:56 · Score: 1

StepTalk is Smalltalk for GNUStep.

Yes by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · 2004-10-19 02:08 · Score: 1

But, this is a completely different set of people behind this. Plus, it isn't nearly as easy to make it work on Linux or windows. And the product is not used by any major fortune 500 company in any missions critical sense that I know of.

--
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.

Objective C by RAMMS+EIN · 2004-10-19 02:08 · Score: 3, Interesting

The *step development environment is greatly loved by those that use it, and largely ignored by the rest of the world, because they refuse to learn Objective C. Instead, they use Java, which is very much the same idea in a different shape. This is a great pity, because with OpenStep the world could have had it all so much earlier.

Oh, and I wanted to mention that GNUStep is pretty universally percieved to be ugly, but support for theming is being worked on (it already works, but appears very limited).

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.

Re:Objective C by Meowing · 2004-10-19 03:39 · Score: 1

Yep, it's hard to appreciate how the program seems to magically fall into place once you've laid things out with the interface builder until you've tried it. Both Cocoa and GNUstep have Java bindings these days, so fear of ObjC is no longer a reason to avoid them.
Re:Objective C by Feztaa · 2004-10-19 09:37 · Score: 1

Oh, and I wanted to mention that GNUStep is pretty universally percieved to be ugly

Thank you! I've long considered GNUstep to be "OSX, but ugly". And I mean BUTT UGLY!! ;)
Re:Objective C by RAMMS+EIN · 2004-10-19 09:58 · Score: 0, Flamebait

``I've long considered GNUstep to be "OSX, but ugly". And I mean BUTT UGLY!! ;)''

In fact, the resemblance to Windows is striking.

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Re:Objective C by mrchaotica · 2004-10-19 13:07 · Score: 1

The only problem with "OSX, but ugly" is that it can't quite run OS X applications (e.g. X11 instead of Aqua, x86 instead of PPC). It would be GREAT if Apple would fix that so that it could really be a "poor man's OSX" like everyone seems to want, but wouldn't screw up Mac sales since it wouldn't have eye-candy.

--
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Re:Objective C by Art+Tatum · 2004-10-21 13:42 · Score: 1

In fact, the resemblance to Windows is striking.
:-)
Before Windows 95 was released, MS paid NeXT for the rights to use the look.
Many people, including yours truly, still find the NeXT look to be very pleasant. But there is a theme engine. Look at some of the files named screenshot_theme##.png. Additionally, there's a Mac Menu bundle. It all still needs work, but it's coming along.

birthdays again? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:09 · Score: 0

What is it with all of the stupid birthday stories? We hear about perseids and every company that has a birthday every single year. They don't even get that many posts. How about we start accepting some of the stories about tech companies making major decisions that have an effect on everyone in technology and rejecting some of these birthday stories...hmmm?

OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome by Florian · 2004-10-19 02:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's a pity that, at the peak of the Linux desktop hype in the late 1990s, when evangelists predicted the near death of Microsoft, KDE and Gnome were rushed out of the door, and GNUstep development remained obscure. It was the first time that distributed free software development defected from its proven practice of implementing standardized, proven APIs and technology (like POSIX) and created major APIs of its own. The result is that KDE and Gnome have created APIs that nobody uses for serious large-scale software development projects [except those companies who have large investments into KDE/Gnome themselves, like Ximian with Evolution]. Now KDE and Gnome have a long way to go to clean up and standardize their APIs (via freedesktop.org), usability (via UI guidelines) and code, solving issues that adherence to an existing open GUI specification like OpenStep would have prevented in the first place.

Imagine the massive development efforts on KDE and Gnome, including the massive rewrites of their codebases, would instead had gone into GNUstep, so that the GNU/Linux and *BSD desktop would be OS X/Cocao source compatibile today [and companies developing for OS X port their software to Linux basically with one more compiler run]...

--
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70

Re:OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome by muecksteiner · 2004-10-19 02:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

The main trouble - then and now - is that the majority of folks simply "don't get it" why OpenStep is superior to crippleware APIs like Qt/KDE.

KDE is "trying to do an improved Windows on Linux" (and taking a lot of its bad design choices with them in the process), while OpenStep is something entirely different. And for an average, M$-infected programmer using something like that would require some re-thinking of some of one's own assumptions how apps should be coded, so most simply don't bother. Sheep, that's what I call them... ;-)

I guess the apathy towards OpenStep also stems from the fact that most people have never seen NeXTStep development in action - it left most witnesses drooling for more - and/or because they're too conventionally-minded to try anything outside their mainstream C++/Java box. To paraphrase a famous quote, "nobody was ever fired for choosing C++", right? And who's ever heard of Objective C - apart from geeks, that is?.

If you're particularly uncharitable you could argue that the selection process which gave us Linux itself followed a similar pattern. There were technologically more advanced and initially cleaner OS projects out there at the time, but somehow the crowd choose a less-than-cutting-edge project they could at least *understand*.

I used NeXTStep for years, and I'm still doing my software development in ObjC - luckily I work in a niche where this is possible. If all others want to make their life difficult - well, that's their choice... ;-)

Just my two euro cents

A.W.
Re:OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome by IamTheRealMike · 2004-10-19 04:26 · Score: 1

It's easy to say, "what if". What if rather than the hopelessly inelegant Objective-C/C/Java combo MacOS X uses, it had been written entirely in Lisp as the old Symbolics machines were? (reason lisp failed: performance and cost). What if the moon was made of cheese?
Re:OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome by Brandybuck · 2004-10-19 06:40 · Score: 3, Insightful

You are making gross mischaracterizations about KDE. KDE was started to create a destkop, not an API. The API was merely a pleasant side effect. We're not all a bunch of ex-MFC programmers. Some of us have NEVER written native Windows software.

The apathy towards OpenStep stems from two facts. First, until recently there was no Free OpenStep desktop. There was a Free OpenStep API, but not a desktop. And that API wasn't complete at the time Qt/KDE and GTK+/GNOME became popular. The second reason is Objective C. Despite the good things about the language, you must admit if you have any honesty that it is not a common language. Until the release of OSX is was almost a dead language. People starting with a new API prefer to use a language they know. The most common systems languages are still C and C++.

Qt/KDE is not "crippleware". That's below-the-belt FUD that cheapens your whole argument. Even if you have a small enough mind to truly believe that, stating will only hurt your "cause".

--
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Re:OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome by DrCode · 2004-10-19 09:49 · Score: 1

I've no antipathy for OpenStep, just as I have no antipathy towards HURD (which, for all I know, might be a far more advanced OS than Linux). What I do know is that Linux was there for me when I wanted to have a Unix-like work-station. And KDE provided a completely useable desktop even before its 1.0 release.

I still use WindowMaker on my slower home machine. But other than the applets that came with it, I haven't seen anything from OpenStep.
Re:OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome by muecksteiner · 2004-10-19 12:43 · Score: 3, Interesting

KDE was started to create a destkop, not an API. The API was merely a pleasant side effect.

Given that my original claim was that the basic structure of KDE is not nearly as well thought out as it should be I can only say - "and your point is?"

With a well thought out comprehensive application development toolkit like OS on the one side, and something which started out as one of these retarded "X desktop projects" ("one more kewl way of drawing Xterms" - granted, it's evolved beyond recognition into something genuinely useable now, but still >;-) and added most of the useful stuff as an afterthought, where do you think my sympathies lie?

I am actually amazed how much the KDE team has achieved, given that the entire software structure is suboptimal compared to e.g. (but probably not only) OpenStep.

The galling thought which the parent poster wanted to bring across was that if all that precious effort put into KDE had been invested into something with a more solid foundation - like for instance OpenStep - we could be much, much further on now than we currently are. People would in all probability be flocking to Linux due to its RAD prototyping capabilites, like they did with NeXTStep - and as a consequence there would not be such a lack of sophisticated GUI applications for the platform.

The apathy towards OpenStep stems from two facts. First, until recently there was no Free OpenStep desktop.

Yes, I agree, that was the thing which broke the back of any widespread OStep adoption. You could download an - arguably buggy and unfinished, but basically USEABLE - version of KDE when the GNUStep guys were still tinkering with the nth unuseable prerelease of their perfect uberdesktop. They did their work well (in the sense of being thorough), and the last sentence was not meant to deride them and their effort. Given the complexity of the project they have fared very well, but they are a bit late to the party now...

Qt/KDE is not "crippleware". That's below-the-belt FUD that cheapens your whole argument.

You are right - that was a rather over-the-top comment; apologies to the KDEers out there.

And I have to add that even if one were in a mood to flame KDE the nomenclature I used would not be entirely correct anyway; KDE is certainly not crippleware as such (this would imply broken functionality, which is generally not the case nowadays), but rather something I would call "conceptual crippleware" - a fundamentally limited design which is being meticulously implemented by a very dedicated team... >;-)

0.2E-32 EUR

A.W.

Re:I'll be the 1st one to say *iirrk*, take it awa by HeghmoH · 2004-10-19 02:12 · Score: 1

On my UNIX box (Mac OS X), OpenStep looks absolutely fantastic. It's generally acknowledged to be the best-looking GUI out there.

GNUStep may have a crappy look, but that's hardly inherent to the APIs. I'm sure fixing this problem wouldn't hurt adoption, though.

--
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Qt acheived this already by xynopsis · 2004-10-19 02:16 · Score: 1, Informative

an application development standard that would run on all machines, making 'write once, compile everywhere' a reality, is still unfolding...

Qt does this already and is much more powerful, robust, mature and well tested. Not to mention a feature-rich native C++ API that not only includes GUI functionality but useful tools (sockets, threads, containers, xml, and more) that nearly rivals those found in the standard Java libraries. I don't work for Trolltech and this is not an endorsement of their product, but writing multi-platform apps in Qt is really fun! I wonder how OpenStep stacks up to Qt. Moreoever, most developers are arguably more familiar with C++ than with Objective C.

Re:I'll be the 1st one to say *iirrk*, take it awa by Arker · 2004-10-19 02:19 · Score: 1

Your aesthetics are certainly not universal. I think the GNUStep stuff on linux looks far better than Aqua, which looks like something a radioactive clown threw up. And I'm writing this on my mac, which I love - I'm not slamming it, it's a great machine, but it's always pissed me off how they fucked up the single best looking system on earth with all this pulsating gumdrop bullshit.

And you can theme GNUStep stuff pretty easily to make it look more like what you want, anyway.

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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History can repeat itself ? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:21 · Score: 0

Maybe it's time for Jobs to make second visit to Alan Kay to see his recent musing ;-) The first one gave enough ideas for Macintosh and NeXT...

Screenshots are dated by idiotnot · 2004-10-19 02:23 · Score: 2, Interesting

I will admit that very recently, some of the GNUStep stuff was stuff that only a mother could love.

However, in the past few months, the interface has come a long way, and things look much better now. No, it doesn't have the eye-candy of Gnome, KDE, or OSX, but it's not really ugly anymore.

FWIW, the real thing, NeXTStep looks very nice on my low-res monochrome NeXT monitor, in much the same way old MacOS looks okay on an old Mac.

WindowMaker, the WM most people use for GNUStep is kind of in need of help, too. There have been a couple of GNUStep/Cocoa WM projects, but nothing's ever really gotten off the ground.

Re:Screenshots are dated by Mordaximus · 2004-10-19 06:08 · Score: 1

WindowMaker, the WM most people use for GNUStep is kind of in need of help, too.
I've been using WM as my only desktop for years. I tried KDE, I tried Gnome but I just end up coming back to quick, sleek WindowMaker. So my question would be, what parts of WindowMaker do you think need help?
Re:Screenshots are dated by idiotnot · 2004-10-19 11:05 · Score: 1

Functionally, WindowMaker works fine. I use it from time to time, and really don't have problems with it. But it's not very customiziable. Menu-editing is a bit of a pain. It also doesn't play very nice with Gworkspace somtimes, fighting over who is going to draw the desktop. Really, once you've got GWorkspace running, all you need is something that'll allow you to place windows, and switch between tasks.
Re:Screenshots are dated by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 14:41 · Score: 0

WindowMaker is just a temporary solution, it's not written in Obj-C and GNUstep, but it's the most NeXT-like wm out there ATM.
There are some interesting projects going on though, like http://home.gna.org/garma for example.
Re:Screenshots are dated by Gandalf_007 · 2004-10-22 22:09 · Score: 1

Low-res monochrome NeXT monitor??

The NeXT monitors (both "mono" and color) ran at 1120x832, which isn't that high a resolution in today's era of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 displays, but it's not exactly low-res, either, as it's still larger than 1024x768. For its time (1988), it was a very high resolution, as PCs used 640x480 (lucky to have that in 16 colors, or 256 if you're rich!); likewise for Macs (if they weren't at 512x342 or 512x384). Only some workstations like Sun at 1152x900 equalled it, but that was often black/white.

NeXT's "mono" was actually 2-bit grey, with a light and dark grey in addition to black and white. This doesn't sound like much, but believe me, it makes a huge difference, as it means there is virtually no halftoning, and widgets can have a "3D" look without being uglified. Aside from color icons, the NeXT's GUI (menus, windows, dialogs, etc.) was identical on mono and color displays.

--

"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

Informative background by Pan+T.+Hose · 2004-10-19 02:25 · Score: 4, Informative

I've been around computers a long time and i've never heard of it. What major application can anyone mention that has been developed on it? A 10th anniversary of something that barely anyone has ever used (in the big scheme of things) is really not any great thing to celebrate... I like the idea of it, but i'm not sure it's as wonderful of a hit as this news article is trying to make it seem.... Or am i off the mark here?

Apparently.

In the future, when you so desperately want to learn about something, you can use Wikipædia, a free on-line encyclopædia:

OpenStep is an open object-oriented API specification for an object-oriented operating system that uses any modern operating system as its core, principly developed by NeXT. It is important to recognize that while OpenStep is an API specification, OPENSTEP (all capitalized) is a specific implementation of this OpenStep developed by NeXT. While originally built on a Mach-based Unix (such as the core of NeXTSTEP), versions of OPENSTEP were available for Solaris and Windows NT as well. Furthermore the OPENSTEP libraries (the libraries that shipped with the OPENSTEP operating system) are in fact a superset of the original OpenStep specification. The OpenStep API was created as the result of a 1993 collaboration between NeXT Computer and Sun Microsystems, allowing this cut-down version of NeXT's NeXTSTEP operating system object layers to be run on Sun's Solaris operating system (more specifically, Solaris on SPARC-based hardware). Most of the OpenStep effort was to strip away those portions of NeXTSTEP that depended on Mach or NeXT-specific hardware being present. This resulted in a smaller system that consisted primarily of Display PostScript, the Objective-C runtime and compilers, and the majority of the NeXTSTEP Objective-C libraries. Not included was the basic operating system, or the display system. The first draft of the API was published by NeXT in summer 1994. Later that year they released an OpenStep compliant version of their flagship operating system NeXTSTEP running on several of their supported platforms and rebranded it OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP remained NeXT's primary operating system product until they were purchased by Apple Computer in 1997. OPENSTEP was then combined with technologies from the existing Mac OS to produce Mac OS X. Sun never seemed terribly interested in the product, likely a result of the NIH syndrome. In fact it's somewhat unclear why they were ever interested, although it appears it was an attempt to "get in" on the object-oriented operating system market before Microsoft released its plans for the object-oriented Cairo OS (which never happened). Nevertheless they started their port to Solaris some time in 1994, and released it in 1996. When Sun started work on Java just after this point, Solaris OpenStep was never seen again.

NeXTSTEP is the original object-oriented, multitasking operating system that NeXT Computer, Inc. developed to run on its proprietary NeXT computers (informally known as "black boxes"). NeXTSTEP 1.0 was released on 18 September 1989 after several previews starting in 1986, and the last release 3.3 in early 1995, by which time it ran not only on Motorola 68000 series processors (specifically the original black boxes), but also generic IBM compatible x86/Intel, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC). About the time of the 3.2 release NeXT teamed up with Sun Microsystems to develop OpenStep, a cross-platform standard and implementation (for Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and NeXT's version of the Mach kernel) based on NEXTSTEP 3.2. The format of the name had many camel case variants, initially being NextStep, then NeXTstep, then NeXTSTEP, and became NEXTSTEP (all

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Re:I'll be the 1st one to say *iirrk*, take it awa by danalien · 2004-10-19 02:30 · Score: 1

em' you know I ment 'unix' as in the bsd's (etc...) ... and NOT Mac Os X (which btw, resides on-top of a Unix Kernel! - so 'OS X' doesn't have anything to do with Unix - more then that 'Mac OS X' utilizes a Unix kernel...and I thoght we where talking GUI...)

--
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.

Come on, 'Flamebait'? ... by danalien · 2004-10-19 02:33 · Score: 1

... I guess there are after all some who do favor / are gnuStep/OpenStep biased :) *hihi*

--
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.

Re:Come on, 'Flamebait'? ... by mrchaotica · 2004-10-19 12:58 · Score: 1

I think it might have had something to do with the "*FSCK* my CLI looks/has a better feel then gnuStep/OpenStep" bit.

Oh, and by the way, OpenStep can look good -- see Mac OS X : )

--
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

NeXT is a good reference too... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:33 · Score: 1, Informative

I got tired of Safari on Apple, I checked my alternatives.

Opera: Excellent code but kinda "non native" on os x

Mozilla: Not native by any means

So I tried Omnigroups Omniweb (www.omnigroup.com), what made me amazed is its perfect integration with system, real modern approach to UI.

No wonder they turned out to be a NeXT development company themselves.

Re:NeXT is a good reference too... by sunya · 2004-10-19 04:52 · Score: 1

Camino is the Moz renderer with native Mac OSX support :
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/

--
MLT - simple and robust open source multimedia framework for Linux

so where is SUN? by linuxislandsucks · 2004-10-19 02:34 · Score: 1

so where is SUN?

--
Don't Tread on OpenSource

Re:so where is SUN? by ElitistWhiner · 2004-10-19 03:54 · Score: 1

Sun created OPENSTEP together with Steve Jobs in order to kill NeXTSTEP for Solaris to thrive. Sumarily, Sun repurposed every programmer dedicated to OPENSTEP development which effectively abandoned the spec... Ta Dah! =r

Re:Qt acheived this already by ultrabot · 2004-10-19 02:36 · Score: 1

Qt does this already and is much more powerful, robust, mature and well tested.

... and expensive.

--
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak

and BTW.. by danalien · 2004-10-19 02:37 · Score: 1

stick to what I really said! *jjjii*

I NEVER commented on the APIs them self, all I said it (gnuStep/OpenStep) looked awful on linux/unix vs Mac Os X ... a comment more on 'how the/a widge(s) look(s/ed)' ... rather then 'programming interface...'

--
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.

annoyed by phoxix · 2004-10-19 02:41 · Score: 3, Insightful

why does GNUstep need to have a top devel dir in my home directory ? Why couldn't it be a freaking dot-dir like every other program ?

it seems a bit arrogant to me that something needs its own directory in the root of my home directory.

I don't even use GNUstep, but its always there. It keeps coming back too, after I remove it.

Sunny Dubey

Re:annoyed by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:25 · Score: 0

....use the soouuurrrrrcccce....
Re:annoyed by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:20 · Score: 0

Because files are generally not hidden from the user in *step. It is less mysterious to the user, and I would argue that this is a good thing. The dot naming convention is a kludge, anyway.
Re:annoyed by drinkypoo · 2004-10-19 06:52 · Score: 2, Insightful

As long as Unix lacks a flag or ACL to hide files, the dot-convention is absolutely necessary. It is quite simply the way one hides files on Unix systems and it would be better to do so. If you're so worried about the user's experience, leave it to the user whether they need to see those directories or not.

--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Re:annoyed by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 14:34 · Score: 0

Since you don't use GNUstep, it most likely comes from WindowMaker.
Don't ask me why WindowMaker stores preferences in a GNUstep directory though, WindowMaker has very little to do with GNUstep.
Windowmaker was written using WINGS (Wings Is Not GnuStep)
Re:annoyed by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 18:14 · Score: 0

Or, you could simply put all configuration files under a single directory, called, I don't know, ~/Library/, and be done with it--without completely leaving the non-expert user in the dust. Oh wait, that's what they did. Sorry, but this is a nit.
Re:annoyed by Rysc · 2004-10-20 09:38 · Score: 1

Or you could put all configuration files under a single directory called, I don't know, ~/.etc/. Then you could put all OpenStep configuration files under ~/.etc/OLibrary/.

The file browser could then decide whether to hide .etc (traditional! Expected! Makes sure the user doesn't delete it thinking it's a junk folder!) or show it.

--
I want my Cowboyneal
Re:annoyed by RAMMS+EIN · 2004-10-20 10:07 · Score: 1

I actually think a visible dir collecting all the settings is the better approach over a host of dotfiles. Read Dotfiles Considered Harmful for more verbosity.

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.

Re:Qt acheived this already by OmniVector · 2004-10-19 02:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

any program worth his shit should have no trouble picking up objective-c (a far simpler and more powerful language than c++). the language barrier really isn't an issue. it's more an issue of mindshare. there are a lot of things that are better in the computing world by design but get largely ignored due to lack of marketing.

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- tristan

80% of all software is custom built by KamuSan · 2004-10-19 02:52 · Score: 3, Insightful

OpenStep was really popular with several large banks for their internal applications.

Good question, but the fact that you don't see a lot of programs made with a particular framework doesn't mean it's not widely used. 80% of all software (just a guess, maybe it's even more) that is written is custom built software for a specific customer or purpose.

Re:Write once run anywhere will *NEVER* happen by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 02:53 · Score: 1, Insightful

Uh...Doom 3 pretty much was written with that in mind. Once you get their resource/WAD/bytecode/whatever files onto your system, all that matters is the executable and a few library files. I downloaded those from id's site, and had it running on Linux in minutes. Sure, it was primarily designed to work on Windows boxes (or more likely consoles), but with a smart design you can leave your doors open to many markets.

write once, compile everywhere... by naryco · 2004-10-19 03:00 · Score: 0, Troll

Hmm, this sounds familiar.. as if I had heard the same sentence many times, but never when speaking about openstep. Could it be that they never heard about Java and C#? Let the the thing die as everybody knows it is already dying...

Re:write once, compile everywhere... by Antifuse · 2004-10-19 03:16 · Score: 1

Ummm... Openstep/Nextstep predates Java and C# by a fair amount. Perhaps it's Java and C#, that have never heard of *step? Of course, having said that, I coded for 2 years in Openstep on Windows, and it SUCKED. This was pre-Yellowbox, though... and as much as I *loved* objective C, the framework for doing OpenStep apps was horrible.
Re:write once, compile everywhere... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:45 · Score: 0

Er, there was no real difference between YellowBox and OpenStep for NT.

I worked on OpenStep/NT for a couple years, but I did as much of the actual development work as possible on OpenStep/Mach.

The class framework wasn't any different on NT, and it was pretty nice on Mach.

NT just turns everything it touches into crap.

Re:Qt acheived this already by akeep · 2004-10-19 03:07 · Score: 2, Informative

Pay attention junior. When OpenStep was released in it's first PRODUCTION version, having evolved from several years of NeXTStep development, Qt was just a gleam in the eye of Trolltech, who was just incorporating with a vision of building something like this.

Is Windowmaker dead? (No, I'm not a troll.) by Glytch · 2004-10-19 03:12 · Score: 2, Interesting

The website hasn't been updated since February, I've gotten no CVS updates since July, there's been no official releases since 0.80.2, there's no working mailing list archives on the site, and my emails go unanswered.

I'm seriously interested in knowing. I'm a big Windowmaker fan, but I'm worried about its' apparent lack of development. Does anyone, anyone at all, know what the heck is going on?

Re:Is Windowmaker dead? (No, I'm not a troll.) by LizardKing · 2004-10-19 10:18 · Score: 1

The mailing list archives are a bit hard to find, but there is plenty of activity. Most of the past year has been spent reworking large chunks of WindowMaker to use freedesktop standard technology like Xft. This major reworking should make WindowMaker as upto date as any other snazzy window manager out there, but with the NeXT look and feel that many of us love.
Re:Is Windowmaker dead? (No, I'm not a troll.) by Glytch · 2004-10-19 11:19 · Score: 1

Ah, good to hear. Thanks.

cocoa/openstep devs... by geg81 · 2004-10-19 03:12 · Score: 1

Cocoa developers keep raving about it and its development environment. It might be useful if people familiar with it and some other development environment/platform to provide some more specifics. In what way is it supposed to be better than Eclipse, VisualStudio, Sharpdevelop? In what way is Cocoa supposed to be better than Swing, SWT, Gtk+, XUL?

Re:cocoa/openstep devs... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:29 · Score: 1, Interesting

It's hard to explain specific advantages without spending an enormous amount of time on any one talking-point. And the way you phrased your question doesn't help either...

Do you want workflow advantages? That's a hard thing to talk about. I will say that Interface Builder is simply amazing. There's something about being able to drag and drop a GUI together in a matter of minutes that brings a smile to my face.

API design advantages? Just browse the docs (google is your friend).

Language advantages? Objective-C is plain amazing in its simplicity, flexibility and design. I literally taught myself Objective-C over a weekend. Do remember, it's still C and you can use C++ (and Java through the bridge) if you want.

Etc.

I'd suggest finding a friend with a Mac. Borrow/Use it for a day or two and run through some of the tutorials you can find here: http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/

Even without sitting in front of a Mac, running through the steps, you can see how nice and easy it is.
Re:cocoa/openstep devs... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-21 19:45 · Score: 0

I'd suggest finding a friend with a Mac. Borrow/Use it for a day or two and run through some of the tutorials you can find here: http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/ Even without sitting in front of a Mac, running through the steps, you can see how nice and easy it is.

I have a Mac, I tried all that, and I don't find it nice and easy. Rather, I find it pretty cumbersome compared to Java or C# or Python development, and the IDEs pretty outdated compared to what I can get for other platforms. Hence, the question: what am I missing and what concrete advantages is it supposed to have.

How was that trolling? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:21 · Score: 0

The story implied a link between OpenStep's tenth birthday and the number ten in "OS X", which seems fairly absurd. Why is it trolling to point that out?

No gnuSTEP link in the writeup? by RdsArts · 2004-10-19 03:22 · Score: 3, Funny

Why isn't there a link to the GNUstep website in the writeup? You'd think they could link to the GNUstep website in a story that talks about GNUstep. What's with that?

Seriously, next time there's a story that has GNUstep in the writeup, they should probably link the text "GNUstep" to the GNUstep website, which is (of course) www.GNUstep.org.

Re:No gnuSTEP link in the writeup? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 03:54 · Score: 0

I tried going to www.GNUstep [gnustep.org].org, but it didn't work.
Re:No gnuSTEP link in the writeup? by Mordaximus · 2004-10-19 05:48 · Score: 1

Informative?!

The very first link in the article is to GNUstep. Maybe check the links found in the article before griping that the link to GNUstep is not there. Because in fact, there is a link to GNUstep, cleverly disguised as OpenStep API celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Re:No gnuSTEP link in the writeup? by Kent+Recal · 2004-10-19 08:20 · Score: 1

So, uh, I see all this talking about GNUstep. Anyone have a link to their website?

I don't understand... by emil · 2004-10-19 03:27 · Score: 1

If this is the case, then why aren't more commercial OSX applications appearing on the free UNIXen with GNUStep libraries?

If it is so easy to port, then why don't I see Photoshop for Red Hat Linux? This is a big market.

Anything serious use of Objective-C appears to be confined to the Mac platform.

Re:I don't understand... by Seanasy · 2004-10-19 03:43 · Score: 2, Insightful

If this is the case, then why aren't more commercial OSX applications appearing on the free UNIXen with GNUStep libraries?
Unfortunately, GNUStep is still a bit immature despite being around for many years. The reason there aren't commercial apps isn't because OpenStep isn't great/easy-to-use. It's more likely because the free OpenStep-like environment isn't stable/mature. QT and GTK are stable and mature but you don't see a plethora of non-niche commercial apps for those either.
If it is so easy to port, then why don't I see Photoshop for Red Hat Linux? This is a big market.
Photoshop, I believe, is still mostly Carbon, not Cocoa. And, Photoshop on Linux is not a big market. If it were, there would be a QT or GTK Photoshop.
Anything serious use of Objective-C appears to be confined to the Mac platform.
OpenStep has been popular in niche areas like banking and scientific apps. Swarm is developed mainly in cross-platform Obj-C. GNU gcc is still relatively behind in Obj-C support but I think Apple is helping to change that.
Re:I don't understand... by minus_273 · 2004-10-19 07:49 · Score: 1

also it also does not help that linux users dont buy software. Mac users live in a culture of buying software.I think the only people who release commercial linux software have software targetted towards businesses and universities becasue they will buy the software and offset the loss. Therefore you see Vmware, mathematica etc. but no MS office.

--
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Re:I don't understand... by LWATCDR · 2004-10-19 12:54 · Score: 1

"think the only people who release commercial linux software have software targetted towards businesses and universities becasue they will buy the software and offset the loss. Therefore you see Vmware, mathematica etc. but no MS office."
Ummm.... Then when will we see MSSQL? MS Office has got to be the worst example you could pick. Not to mention that Microsoft makes most of it's money from business sales of Office.

--
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.

Slab & G5...thanx NeXT for taking over Apple by blakespot · 2004-10-19 03:33 · Score: 1

I love my NeXT. And praise Steve and the NeXT crew for taking over Apple and giving me the latest NEXTSTEP/OpenStep (Mac OS X) on blazing hardware...namely, my dual G5 2.5.

blakespot

--
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com

Re:There was never anything so consistent, stable. by jkujawa · 2004-10-19 03:43 · Score: 2, Interesting

Port of webster.app:

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidictiona ry/

In 1986 NeXT ran fast on a 25mhz processor by walterbyrd · 2004-10-19 03:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

And without a lot of RAM.

After nearly 20 years of "progress" we need at least a 400mhz processor, with 256mb of RAM to equal it.

Why?

Re:In 1986 NeXT ran fast on a 25mhz processor by iggymanz · 2004-10-19 03:52 · Score: 1

yeah, my 1990 NeXTStation ran with 8MB of RAM, and the OS plus Mathematica & the usual NeXT apps fit on a 200MB disk. The UI had very crisp response, not the mushie feel of X11 derived stuff
Re:In 1986 NeXT ran fast on a 25mhz processor by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:27 · Score: 0

And in monochrome.

And at what's beginning to be considered low resolution.

Sorry, I love NeXT (I have two cubes & two slabs), but try running OPENSTEP 4.2 in 16 or 32-bit color and you will find that it's not really that snappy compared to a modern system.
Re:In 1986 NeXT ran fast on a 25mhz processor by walterbyrd · 2004-10-19 13:39 · Score: 1

Still, most modern PCs have about 100X the processor speed, and maybe 10X the RAM.
Re:In 1986 NeXT ran fast on a 25mhz processor by RAMMS+EIN · 2004-10-20 10:17 · Score: 1

``After nearly 20 years of "progress" we need at least a 400mhz processor, with 256mb of RAM to equal it.

Why?''

Various reasons. The PC architecture is crap. It also wasn't originally intended to do graphics, and graphics continue to be painful to this day.

On the other hand, there is software. Common software is extremely bloated, no matter which system you're looking at.

And the sickening thing is that it all gets worse, because that makes economic sense. There is a great symbiosis between hardware and software makers. The software gets more bloated, demand for faster hardware rises, which in turn allows crappier software to be accepted.

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.

It's a damn OO framework, not a GUI by namekuseijin · 2004-10-19 03:55 · Score: 1

It's a very complete, elegant and large OO framework for quickly developing applications of any kind, even CLI ones.

That's exactly why it can run on Mac, using it's pretty GUI, or using a NeXT-style GUI like WindowMaker.

--
I don't feel like it...

Re:It's a damn OO framework, not a GUI by danalien · 2004-10-19 06:53 · Score: 1
You're like: HeghmoH (13204)(#10564638)
- It's a very complete, elegant and large OO framework for quickly developing applications of any kind, even CLI ones.
could you _puuhhleaasse_ take a hint I'm and/or " NEVER commented on the APIs them self, all I said it (gnuStep/OpenStep) looked awful on linux/unix vs Mac Os X ... a comment more on 'how the/a widge(s) look(s/ed)' ... rather then 'programming interface...'"
2nd of all (now I'm gonna imply something about the API) /* as someone other (or others) have commented... */ if it's such a "Best thing since sliced bread" and it's been around for the past 10 years .... why hasn't it been adopted at any large xor larger rate/scale? isn't the 'defacto standard' everyone of us use(s)? *hmm* ... I mean, there has to _be_ something to it, of why it's still quite unheard off to some people (That's other ppl then the type 'you and I' are... GEEKs and/or überGEEKs!)?
so why is it not? why is it not used in a larger scale then the 'tiny' fraction that it is used today?
--
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Re:It's a damn OO framework, not a GUI by namekuseijin · 2004-10-19 09:28 · Score: 1

if it's such a "Best thing since sliced bread" and it's been around for the past 10 years .... why hasn't it been adopted at any large xor larger rate/scale? isn't the 'defacto standard' everyone of us use(s)?

Perhaps for the same reason why Visual Basic, Access, PHP or other lamers are so popular: because they're easy tools for non-professional, non-educated, programmers to get into and quickly build up a-something?

so why is it not? why is it not used in a larger scale then the 'tiny' fraction that it is used today?

Because Real Tools (TM) are for Real Programmers (TM) to build up Real Systems (TM), and, today, that's really just a fraction of a large market saturated by non-professional bozos highly dependent on development environments deployed by a large monopoly which shall remain nameless.

I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.

Ok, you know less than i do.

--
I don't feel like it...

GnuSTEP, OPENSTEP, NeXSTEP, MacOSX... by ElitistWhiner · 2004-10-19 04:04 · Score: 1

are not equivalents. GnuSTEP is Gnu's implementation of the OPENSTEP spec. OPENSTEP is only a spec which is a subset of the NeXTSTEP OS frameworks. NeXTSTEP is an OS sitting ontop of BSD4.x including application framework, programming environment and special sauce. MacOSX is a bastard child of NeXTSTEP stripped of interprocess communication, postscript, scsi and the special sauce. -r

Re:GnuSTEP, OPENSTEP, NeXSTEP, MacOSX... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:10 · Score: 0

Actually, "OpenStep" was the spec, and OPENSTEP was the operating system (NEXTSTEP renamed).
Re:GnuSTEP, OPENSTEP, NeXSTEP, MacOSX... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:38 · Score: 0

I challenge you to name one significant difference between the PDF format and postscript.
Re:GnuSTEP, OPENSTEP, NeXSTEP, MacOSX... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:00 · Score: 1, Insightful

Well, PostScript has flow control constructs (if/then,loops,etc.), and PDF does not. Personally I think this makes PDF better than PostScript. Want to view page 799 of an 800 page document that's PostScript? Guess what, you have to render the first 798 pages, because there could be state somewhere in there that affects page 799. PDF avoids that.
Re:GnuSTEP, OPENSTEP, NeXSTEP, MacOSX... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:31 · Score: 0

Actually, OPENSTEP was the development environment and "OPENSTEP for Mach" was the operating system. Just joking. Seriously, can't we just drop it after 10 years?
Re:GnuSTEP, OPENSTEP, NeXSTEP, MacOSX... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 05:34 · Score: 0

Postscript is much slower.
Re:GnuSTEP, OPENSTEP, NeXSTEP, MacOSX... by jeif1k · 2004-10-19 07:07 · Score: 1

NeXT is based on the Mach kernel, not BSD. It happens to implement the BSD APIs via some BSD code.
Re:GnuSTEP, OPENSTEP, NeXSTEP, MacOSX... by argent · 2004-10-19 07:50 · Score: 1

NeXTStep was based on BSD. Mach is not a complete kernel, though it is more extensive than most microkernels and I have some difficulty using that term for it. It's the same kind of Mach+BSD merge as Tru64, Darwin, and Lites. It's much more than just "some BSD code to implement the BSD APIs".
Re:GnuSTEP, OPENSTEP, NeXSTEP, MacOSX... by argent · 2004-10-19 07:55 · Score: 1

Want to view page 799 of an 800 page document that's PostScript? Guess what, you have to render the first 798 pages

Maybe, maybe not. There are ways to structure Postscript and provide assertions about what part of the code is required. Most modern Postscript generators provide these assertions and there's no reason DPS can't benefit from that kind of provision.

The big problem with Display Postscript is that DPS had all the overhead of a full Postscript interpreter but it doesn't use it for much more than rendering. NeWS used the Postscript interpreter to handle the ebb and flow of minor user-interface operations, allowing the server to handle them without the overhead of a context switch back to the application until something like a menu selection had been completed.
Re:GnuSTEP, OPENSTEP, NeXSTEP, MacOSX... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 10:10 · Score: 0

It's the same kind of Mach+BSD merge as Tru64, Darwin, and Lites

Yes, which makes it not BSD. BSD is a lean, monolithic kernel. Mach is something completely different (worse, in the opinion of many).

Re:Write once run anywhere will *NEVER* happen by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:05 · Score: 1, Interesting

yeah, I don't get why people say it isn't possible. I've been doing it for years .. no prob. Both on the client and the server.

I routinely write on Windows and deploy on Linux. I never think twice about it.. I even test only on Windows and it has never caused me a problem.

So WORA is here.. whether you choose to acknowledge the fact or not.

Ugly? by Jonathan · 2004-10-19 04:10 · Score: 1

A lot of the comments here seem to suggest that many people find the traditional NeXTStep (GNUStep) look ugly. But I can't believe that *all* people believe that -- look at the popularity of windowmanagers like WindowMaker and AfterStep. Plus practically every theming utility for every platform includes a NeXTStep theme. It might not be as flashy as Aqua, but I rather like the traditional NeXTStep look.

Re:Ugly? by borgheron · 2004-10-19 04:27 · Score: 1

Add to this the fact that there is a theme engine called Camaelon which can change the default look dramatically.

GJC

--
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Re:Ugly? by rednever · 2004-10-19 08:33 · Score: 1

*cough* Windows 95 *cough*

Who says Microsoft only ripped off the Mac OS?
Re:Ugly? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-20 02:33 · Score: 0

Yep. Windows stole quite a bit from NeXTSTEP's look. And pretty blatantly too. Down to the minimize icon.

Re:There was never anything so consistent, stable. by WillAdams · 2004-10-19 04:13 · Score: 1

'cept that it requires a 'net connection 'cause it uses dict.org so doesn't work out well at home on my wife's PowerBook.

I've been using the WordNet front-end which is okay, but different, and the folks at Nisus did a decent thesaurus a while back.

To further exacerbate the problem since there's no default client to secure the Command= key combination some apps make use of it, so one loses the synergy and consistency which NeXTstep afforded.

William

--
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Next-Just a "Note". by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:16 · Score: 0

And as I pointed out, people are still doing nice things with Smalltalk (read the front page for details).

I want Smalltalk on OS X.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:22 · Score: 0

Lately I've been playing around with Squeak. I've also done a bit of Cocoa using Objective-C. The 0bjC object model is basically lifted right out of Smalltalk...Java works on OS X even though it has a different object model...it seems to me it wouldn't be a huge problem to get a native-Cocoa smalltalk. Seems you'd get all the stuff people love about ObjC, except with garbage collection, and in general a more powerful language (lexical closures, etc).

Anyone aware of such a thing?

Re:I want Smalltalk on OS X.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 11:03 · Score: 1, Interesting

You might want to look at F-Script, which is a combination of Smalltalk and Cocoa Syntax is Smalltalk (including blocks etc.) and object model is Cocoa. Absolutely wonderful to play with Cocoa objects interactively.

Re:There was never anything so consistent, stable. by jkujawa · 2004-10-19 04:27 · Score: 1

This sets up a local dictionary server.

OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome-In the beginning. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:33 · Score: 0

"The main trouble - then and now - is that the majority of folks simply "don't get it" why OpenStep is superior to crippleware APIs like Qt/KDE."

The Smalltalk/Lisp people know exactly how you feel.

Just wait 10 years. What's old is new again.

Re:Qt acheived this already by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:36 · Score: 0

Where on Earth do you get that the Qt clusterfuck is "more powerful, robust, mature and well-tested" than OpenSTEP? Qt is none of those things. Also, Qt applications look and act like shit. No-one accepts a Qt app unless they have to.

Ugly menus. by argent · 2004-10-19 04:41 · Score: 2, Interesting

The big problem with the classic NeXT look is the menus. Whether they're in the corner in classic NeXTstep, or hovering next to the active window in GNUstep, they're just plain inconvenient and obtrusive.

Windows-style title bars work better. Apple's "all menus at the top of the screen" are OK, if you have good and consistent context menus (unfortunately Apple doesn't). But the big grey box is obtrusive and needs to change. It shouldn't be too hard... they could be made as configurable as you want without changing the API... but they've been enough to make me shy away from GNUstep apps.

The best alternative, I think, might be to attach them to the title bar of the active window, but in a horizontal menu-bar layout.

Re:Ugly menus. by uhoreg · 2004-10-19 06:25 · Score: 1

You can try WildMenus, which puts the menubar at the top of the screen, like on MacOS.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/wildmenus/

--
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
Re:Ugly menus. by rthille · 2004-10-19 09:00 · Score: 2, Informative

Well, if you left the menu in the upper left corner of the screen, it was sort of a problem. But if you moved it to the bottom left of the screen, with just the application's name showing and used the left mouse button to bring up the menu wherever your mouse happened to be on the screen(s), it was way way way more convenient then either OS-X or Windows.
Also, the ability to tear off a sub-menu (say the font menu) and leave it (like a readable tool bar) hovering next to where you were working was an excellent feature.
And don't get me started on the fact that scroll bars should be on the left sice of windows since the right side of a large window is the side more likely to be offscreen!

--
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Re:Ugly menus. by argent · 2004-10-19 10:25 · Score: 1

if you moved it to the bottom left of the screen, with just the application's name showing and used the left mouse button to bring up the menu wherever your mouse happened to be on the screen(s), it was way way way more convenient then either OS-X or Windows.

Ah, so the real advantage to the Uglymenu is you can get rid of it completely and treat it as a context menu. :)

I do like tear-off windows. I like tear-off toolbars and other panel-like objects as well.

scroll bars should be on the left sice of windows

In the ideal GUI, you would be able to grab the end of a scrollbar and tear it off and reattach it to either side of the content. Or for a side-scrolling panel, drag the scrollbar from the bottom side to the top.
Re:Ugly menus. by rthille · 2004-10-19 15:24 · Score: 1

Ah, so the real advantage to the Uglymenu is you can get rid of it completely and treat it as a context menu. :)

Well, the real advantage is that it's up to the user where it goes. :-)

--
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/

cuts both ways by jeif1k · 2004-10-19 04:43 · Score: 1

The funny thing is that people who actually experienced the generation of GUIs before NeXT might say the same thing about NeXT. I mean, you have to deal with C, memory allocation, and pointers? You can't inspect and change the code of a running program? Your GUI runs in a separate process and needs to be programmed in a different language? You can have type errors in your running system without anything flagging an error? What kind of backwards system is that?

I agree to the degree that C++ has always been a bad choice for GUI development. But between ObjectiveC/Cocoa and Java/Eclipse or Python/Gtk+, I hardly see what advantages you think ObjectiveC/Cocoa brings. And, yes, I have tried out Apple's IDE.

Re:cuts both ways by muecksteiner · 2004-10-19 12:19 · Score: 1

I agree with you that nowadays the available alternatives - e.g. Java/Eclipse or Python/Gtk+ - make ObjC/Cocoa a contender on a much more level field than e.g. 10 years ago, and that it is in effect relegated to a niche today due to the various issues which surround it (obscure language, free implementation was and is late and incomplete etc.).

However, the period roughly 10 years ago was the time the original poster was talking about - no real competition for OpenStep existed, and still the majority of open source hackers preferred to develop free implementations of arguably inferior concepts at the time.

Given the obsession with superiority of concept which was so prevalent in early open source movement this remains a slightly strange omission; the whole thread is about historical issues, and not what we should use nowadays...

0.2E-32 EUR

A.W.
Re:cuts both ways by jeif1k · 2004-10-20 00:01 · Score: 1

However, the period roughly 10 years ago was the time the original poster was talking about - no real competition for OpenStep existed

Already in the late 80's, you could get several practical Smalltalk implementations (e.g., ParcPlace, Smalltalk/V, Instantiations), and they were widely used commercially. VisualAge came out around 1993/4.

If you wanted something natively compiled, around that time, you could also get high quality native compilers for a variety of object-oriented languages with garbage collection, including Modula-3, Eiffel, and Oberon. Simula-67 even went back as far as the 1960's. If NeXT had wanted a more dynamic object model than those languages already had, the required additions would have been small compared to the changes NeXT made to Objective-C.

I think NeXTStep just represented a slightly different compromise between using standards accepted by industry (C, UNIX) and what was commercially available state of the art. It was so close to what regular "Joe programmers" felt comfortable with that they "got it", but awed them with a few small bits that were thrown in (GUI builder, nice graphical design, Objective-C). So, I think NeXT was a brilliant marketing compromise (and a good implementation), but technologically, I think it has never been state of the art.

One reason why... by argent · 2004-10-19 04:43 · Score: 2, Interesting

After nearly 20 years of "progress" we need at least a 400mhz processor, with 256mb of RAM to equal it. Why?

High quality rendering and automatic double-buffering. Every window requires megabytes of backing store, and antialiasing slows down the rendering.

Re:One reason why... by mpaque · 2004-10-19 05:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

The original NeXT Cube, and the various NeXTStation products all did double-buffering of windows by default. Now the Cube and monochrome NeXTStation used only 2 bits per pixel, which helped, but consider the NeXTStation Color:

16 bit per pixel color with alpha channel
1120 x 832 pixel display
25 MHz 68040 processor
16 Mbytes of memory

Double-buffered windows, compositing in the Display PostScript drawing engine, color correction, and a clever dithering scheme to improve color quality. It's still pretty snappy by today's standards, especially when porked out with a huge 64 Mbytes of memory. Woo hoo!
Re:One reason why... by RAMMS+EIN · 2004-10-20 10:10 · Score: 1

``High quality rendering and automatic double-buffering.''

Which should, of course, be done by the video card. The efficiency difference between special purpose and general purpose hardware is multiple orders of magnitude - you really don't want to be wasting millions of CPU cycles on a task that a GPU can easily handle.

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Re:One reason why... by argent · 2004-10-20 11:43 · Score: 1

They're moving it into the videocard now, with Quartz Extreme. And hopefully they'll set up a real cache hierarchy into the video card that will make it unnecessary to do any rendering in the CPU... however, Mac OS X and Quartz has to run on a lot of machines that don't have a GPU capable of taking over from the G3 or G4 on the motherboard: the low end models still supported, like the iMac G3/266, have a Rage II chipset and 2-6M SGRAM. Even if it's capable of running the Quartz rendering engine in the GPU, it doesn't have enough video RAM.

WorldWideWeb / OS X (a bit offtopic) by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:44 · Score: 0

The OS X Cocoa API is really nothing more than the NeXTStep API set, and is almost 100% source compatible with programs from the old NeXT machines.

Speaking of which, has anyone succeeded in an OS X port of WorlWideWeb? I got the sources from Berners-Lee's site but the nib file was (as excepted) fucked up.

Does anyone know where I can get a proper nib file, know any way to fix the one in the source distribution, or even better, have a fully functional OS X port of WorldWideWeb?

Re:WorldWideWeb / OS X (a bit offtopic) by AKAImBatman · 2004-10-19 05:04 · Score: 1

This is all I could find. It doesn't seem that many people are all that interested in getting it working.

Personally, I wish Sun would release NeWS. Gosling may think the code is of no use, but I consider it an important part of computing history. Not to mention that computing has been off-track for the past decade, and has only now started to pick up again as people's love affair with Microsoft has waned.

--
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade

Annoying menus. by argent · 2004-10-19 04:49 · Score: 1

The vertical menu makes tear-off sub-menus make sense, which allows effortless customization of one's working environment for a given task w/o inscrutable toolbars

The vertical menu, however, is enough to keep me from using any of the GNUstep apps I installed on my computer, before I switched to OS X. I really wanted to like it, but it was just too annoying to use. I've got a Nextstation, had it for a while, and it's annoying there as well.

If anything should have been configurable from the start, it's the menus. Put them in a toolbar, slide them out from behind the title bar, even put them at the top of the screen as Rhapsody did. But the big gray box turned me off completely.

Re:Annoying menus. by WillAdams · 2004-10-19 05:05 · Score: 1

What's annoying about them? I find the space wasted by the horizontal menu on my 19" monitor on my G4 at work very annoying, but vertical menus, ``just work'' (and have for over ten years of using NeXT/OPENstep).

I agree it'd be nice if one could switch between horizontal and vertical menus --- hard to balance that with ease-of-use / consistency issues though.

William

--
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Re:Annoying menus. by roard · 2004-10-19 05:09 · Score: 1

er, there is a gui bundle for gnustep that actually change that -- it moves the menu on the top, like on MacOS. So you can choose to not use the vertical menus, if you want(personally, I'm a big fan of vertical menus, but on a big screen - on a small screen, I tend to prefer horizontal menus :-)
Re:Annoying menus. by argent · 2004-10-19 08:39 · Score: 1

I find the space wasted by the horizontal menu on my 19" monitor on my G4 at work very annoying

Heh. You're comparing an annoying design with another only slightly less annoying design.

I find having to move my mouse to the top of the screen or the upper left corner of the screen on Nextstep annoying. I find having big blocks of vertical menus following my focus around on GNUstep annoying. How about horizontal menus attached to the window, or even better: context menus that only show up when requested?
Re:Annoying menus. by WillAdams · 2004-10-19 12:53 · Score: 1

If you don't wish to move to the top-left corner of the screen in NeXT/OPENstep you can:

- position it somewhere else
- enable the right-button pop-up menu
- tear off sub-menus and position them strategically

Which is three options more than the monolithic Mac-style menu affords.

The top-left corner is a good position though, since it takes advantage of Fitts' law (once one shifts an app's menu slightly to the left). In-window menus are bad 'cause they lose that advantage.

William

--
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Re:Annoying menus. by argent · 2004-10-19 14:45 · Score: 1

Having multiple options is of course an advantage, but having multiple options has absolutely nothing to do with the menu style. Tk menus on Windows and UNIX are in-window, but they're also tear-off. Pop-op menus are again independent: the Amiga had several patches that let you use either top-of-screen or under-the-mouse pop-up menus.

Having a menu in a fixed place on the screen is bad, because it means that the movement from where you're working (in the window) to wherever the menu is varies, depending on where the window you're working on is. Having the menu in the window means that the muscle movement to reach the menu is independent of the location of the window.

Pop-up menus, particularly pie-style pop-ups, do that part even better, but they lose the always-visible nature of other menu styles, so they can't act as cues.

Putting menus at the edge of the screen avoids overshoot, but it loses local context, so hitting the menu is marginally easier but getting back to work brings back the overshoot problem in the other direction. It's like putting the scrollbar on the right instead of the left (another common mistake).

There's so many trade-offs that the only rational option is to let the user specify where the menus should be. In-window, at the top of the screen, in a corner, or as contextual menus on the window background or title bar (the equivalent of pop-ups). Any window system that only allows one or two of these options is unnecessarily frustrating some of the users.

Grotesque look and feel by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:49 · Score: 0

Gigantic "bumpy" fields of buttons with a 3d effect so exaggerated it actually needs (and lacks) perspective correction, black on dark dark grey, Menus made of buttons scrolled with horizontal scrollbars, menus that are laid out on said bumpy gray fields vertically, and checkboxes made entirely of a 3d effect that's utterly invisible on a laptop in bright light ... the list goes on and on.

The original NeXT boxes used monochrome screens. The sensibility certainly shows. This might indicate why people don't care to use it today.

Re:Grotesque look and feel by roard · 2004-10-19 04:54 · Score: 1

Actually, you probably want to correct your screen's gamma -- with a proper gamma, the default color scheme of GNUstep looks much better. It's also not very difficult to change the color scheme using Preferences.app, as you can see on this screenshot: http://www.nongnu.org/backbone/images/screenshots/ preferences-4.png Plus, the look can be modified with themes : http://www.roard.com/screenshots/screenshot_theme3 4.png
Re:Grotesque look and feel by roard · 2004-10-19 04:57 · Score: 1

Actually, you probably want to correct your screen's gamma -- with a proper gamma, the default color scheme of GNUstep looks much better.
It's also not very difficult to change the color scheme using Preferences.app, as you can see on this screenshot.
Plus, the look can be modified with themes
Re:Grotesque look and feel by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 08:10 · Score: 0

Why the double post dude???

A couple more links by tarzeau · 2004-10-19 04:50 · Score: 3, Informative

Read the OpenStep specification. Try a GNUstep Live CD.

--
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance

I guess WindowMaker is to blame by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 04:51 · Score: 0

Might it be that you're a WindowMaker user? WindowMaker creates this dir for example.

Missing *step source code... anyone help? by argent · 2004-10-19 04:56 · Score: 1

There seems to have been a lot of open-source *step code that was released over the past decade that has dropped off the face of the earth. Is anyone keeping track of this stuff, mirroring and archiving it? There's some old archives, but the ones I've found have been incomplete.

Re:Responding to your sig: by bnenning · 2004-10-19 05:01 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Well, you didn't actually respond to my sig, but that's ok.

Government data compares Democrat and Republican economics.

Misleading for several reasons. The majority of government spending is on entitlements that were put in place by previous (mostly Democratic) administrations. The "peace dividend" after the end of the Cold War was going to result in lower deficits for either party. And a great deal of Clinton's proposed spending was blocked by Republicans in Congress.

Having said that, I fully agree that Bush is spending like a drunken sailor and it needs to stop. Unfortunately Kerry proposes to spend even more, so the only way that's a reason to vote for him is to hope that gridlock will prevent most of it if Congress stays GOP.

--
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.

Win32 Ports Please! by JPyObjC+Dude · 2004-10-19 05:22 · Score: 2, Interesting

Although I use Mac at home, I work for a bunch of microsofties. There is so little out there on runing OpenStep Obj-C code on Win32. I'd love to see these frameworks and particuarily ObjC get more usage.

I've been avoiding any c'ish programming on win32 since I generally don't like C++ and hate using M$ frameworks. Anybody know of and REAL projects to bring ObjC to win32?

JsD

[Use Firefox or Die]

Re:Win32 Ports Please! by itomato · 2004-10-19 09:28 · Score: 1

Apple tried at least twice to induce development of ObjC apps on Win32. OPENSTEP Enterprise was an NT port of the OPENSTEP API, and as the NeXT/Apple transition was taking place, they had a version of Rhapsody to take its place.

GNUStep has a Windows port: ftp://ftp.gnustep.org/pub/gnustep/binaries/windows /

They're about the only ObjC effort underway, afik..
Re:Win32 Ports Please! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-20 11:48 · Score: 0

Yes, there is an implementation of Cocoa for Win32 which will be released under an MIT license sometime next year, once I get all the legal BS straightened out.

It's not 100%, but in far better shape for writing Windows apps than GNUStep is.
Re:Win32 Ports Please! by JPyObjC+Dude · 2004-10-20 14:15 · Score: 1

Hey, that's great.

Will these framework allow for cross OS compilation and execution of code?

Nee-Zit? by SimHacker · 2004-10-19 07:25 · Score: 1

Are there still people who pronounce NeXT like "Nee-Zit"?

-Don

--
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com

Re:There was never anything so consistent, stable. by jafac · 2004-10-19 07:27 · Score: 1

Don't forget the attrocity that is OS X - supposedly an evolution of NeXTSTEP, without the best features of the NeXTSTEP GUI. (most beloved feature I miss: tear-off menus - get WITH it Steve. . . )

--

These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.

Can anyone recommend a good distro? by Senjutsu · 2004-10-19 07:30 · Score: 1

The last time I checked, my prefered distro (gentoo) had ancient and nearly broken support for GNUstep. Does anyone know of a distro with really good support for runiing it?

Re:Can anyone recommend a good distro? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 07:48 · Score: 0

Check again, Gentoo has better support now.
Re:Can anyone recommend a good distro? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 08:31 · Score: 0

Debian has great GNUstep support. The GNUstep LIVE CD is also based on Debian (and Morphix).
Re:Can anyone recommend a good distro? by Art+Tatum · 2004-10-21 13:56 · Score: 1

I also use Gentoo, but I always build GNUstep from CVS (just because there are always a lot of bugfixes and new features and it hasn't completely stabilized yet). I have a shell script that updates and goes through the entire core tree, building all the frameworks and components that I use.
I believe that somebody has been playing with ebuilds, however. The real problem for all of this is that GNUstep isn't really a desktop yet.

You can't google for "NeXT" by SimHacker · 2004-10-19 07:30 · Score: 1

You can't google for "NeXT" because google is case insensitive, and you won't get many relevant results. That's the real reason why Microsoft had changed the name of "COM" to "ActiveX".

Google has made it much more important to give companies, products and projects uniquely spelled names, so they can be easily found.

-Don

--
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com

Re:You can't google for "NeXT" by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-22 08:07 · Score: 0

Sometimes google is case sensitive. Try to search "G" or "g" on google...

Re:Qt acheived this already by jafac · 2004-10-19 07:39 · Score: 1

any program worth his shit should have no trouble picking up objective-c (a far simpler and more powerful language than c++). the language barrier really isn't an issue. it's more an issue of mindshare. there are a lot of things that are better in the computing world by design but get largely ignored due to lack of marketing.

Frankly, this should be any "programmer worth his (or her) shit"'s attitude towards ANY programming language or technology.

No programmer worth his (or her) shit or ANY shit, should EVER learn just "the one hot marketable skill" and then sit on it for the length of a career.
A specific skill or language should NEVER EVER be a prerequisite for a job.

A worthwhile programmer should know the sound principles of software engineering, be perhapse well-versed in two or three languages, and be able to adapt by learning a new skill where required.

I know that a response to the parent in this thread is basically preaching to the choir. But it seems that HR folks are really clueless when it comes to hiring programmers these days. In a world where monoculture KILLS, in a heterogeneous world, a multi-platform world, it's absolutely INSANE to look for or hire programmers, not on the basis of versitility, but on the basis of knowing the "latest fashionable buzzword-compliant technology".

This was a problem in the 1990's, and you know, it's really starting to get stale. /ticked-off.

--

These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.

Wildmenus... details? by argent · 2004-10-19 07:45 · Score: 1

Looks interesting, when I get back to a non-OSX environment I'll check it out. I'd still rather have a Windows/Motif style menu bar, particularly in a mixed environment, but this would be OK.

Re:Wildmenus... details? by uhoreg · 2004-10-19 12:59 · Score: 1

I just started trying it out today, so I don't know much about it. I'm also using the Debian package, so I don't know how it is compiling from source. It seems to work as advertised, although it doesn't interact well with the GNOME panel (in that it tries to occupy the same space as where I have a panel, and the panel wants to stay on top, so it sometimes hides the menu), but that is to be expected. It also seems to have some problems drawing certain menus too, but other than that, it does exactly what it claims to do.

--
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.

Can I say something? by danalien · 2004-10-19 08:30 · Score: 1

I know you aren't asking me that question...

But I got somethin to say, never the less :)

- - -

I hit me to what one can/could associate 'gnuStep/OpenStep' to/with. Hurd.

And I want to make (perfectly) clear! - I'm not implying anything else then ' They didn't make/haven't made it, not even after 10+ years '.

Let me elaborate; They, gnuStep/OpenStep and Hurd, choose to go about a different path then any of their competitors - Whoose to say whom made the wisest choice? We don't know xor can't say - Though, what we can conclude is that most users (not developers) have choosen and choose to use not-them/their solution; for reason A-Z.

So, 10+ years have passed - It seems resonable/logical to, is in-order to, ask oneself three questions after such a long while:

Why do users choose to travel not-our path?
- Haven't you ever wondered, all these years, why they turn(ed) you down? Why they opt(ed) the other path(s)? etc..
What do I think our/my path should be? keep current heading, change, ...etc?
- I mean it's your, the developer(s), prerogative to choose what your projects mission should be - and noone can ask/demand anything more from yourself(s) then what you are willing (choose) to do.
and finally (the Freud-question), Do you care what their choice is?
- *picks up a flower, and starts to sing* Have ego/seek attention, the 'size of':
- Ayers Rock, regular rock, moon, RMS, ... <Insert a few more objects/things> ... and repeat untill you pick the last petal =)

There's a quote " One in a million " - and I think its imply is sound, not every one/project makes it; some are bound to fail. " Que sera sera "

--
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.

Help! by HoldmyCauls · 2004-10-19 08:46 · Score: 1

Those both look like WindowMaker to my severely untrained eyes! Is there something specific in the libs to those above mentioned and WM that should really matter to me as a (potential, since I like the idea of a simple, easily-configured desktop) GNUStep user? How about to someone who wishes to use GNOME or KDE on top of GNUstep (is that possible? I know the panel apps would likely work, but explain it to me like I'm an idiot, please!)

--
Emacs: for people who just never know when to :q!

Re:Help! by babyblink · 2004-10-20 18:48 · Score: 1

Hi, garma isn't ready for any desktop user at the moment. And I (as one of garma's developer) am focusing on Maliwan which is a frame work that is usable on both GNUstep and Cocoa. Garma's critical goal is to develop a good desktop publishing environment. The usage of GNOME and KDE on garma won't be much different from using GNOME and KDE on OSX. They will be usable but you will never feel them like native applications.

--
[self dealloc];

OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome-Myths by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 08:47 · Score: 0

"The apathy towards OpenStep stems from two facts. First, until recently there was no Free OpenStep desktop. There was a Free OpenStep API, but not a desktop. And that API wasn't complete at the time Qt/KDE and GTK+/GNOME became popular. The second reason is Objective C. Despite the good things about the language, you must admit if you have any honesty that it is not a common language. Until the release of OSX is was almost a dead language. People starting with a new API prefer to use a language they know. The most common systems languages are still C and C++."

Your first point is more the cause, although it's immaturity isn't the hurdle you think it was. Better to finish up on something that's halfway there, than start from scratch. As for your second point ObjC isn't that much of a step away from C, C++, especially for a group that overall prides itself on it's adaptability.

Maybe the "Myths" surrounding ObjC is what did it in more than anything else.

Mac and OpenSTEP by Pugio · 2004-10-19 08:59 · Score: 1

I'm sorry if this has been discussed before but... From what I see of the OpenStep site, all of this is cross platform. Does this mean that I can Cocoa applications that I've programmed using XCode onto my mac?

GNUStep is alive and well. by itomato · 2004-10-19 09:02 · Score: 1

There are a few folks intensely devoted to bringing GNUstep forward. Gürkan Sengün's GNUStep Live CD is quite an accomplishment. Debian-based (consequently, GNUstep is an 'apt-get install gnustep*' away) It ties together the most mature GNUStep apps with the complete GNUstep backend to give a taste of what's possible.

There's also a mini-iso for debian-hurd & ppc packages!!

Re:GNUStep is alive and well. by mbanck · 2004-10-19 12:13 · Score: 1

consequently, GNUstep is an 'apt-get install gnustep*' away
No it isn't, because for some obscure reason the Debian GNUStep guys refuse to use gnustep-* as prefix for their applications. They started to package stuff which such specialized names like 'terminal' or 'cdplayer' and of course brought down the wrath of a lot of the other developers on them for polluting the general namespace.
These days, they tend to prefer '*.app' as naming scheme for their packages, which is at least consistent and different (but not very evident for the untrained eye).
There's also a mini-iso for debian-hurd
That's a whole different story (it is no Live-CD, for starters), though Gürkan plays a peripheral role in the Debian Hurd community as well (he has become known lately for seducing what few Hurd hackers are left to play nethack, which, uhm, didn't help productivity :) ). Those Debian Hurd CDs are produced by Philip Charles.
Michael

WOOOPS Mis-Clicked. The question actually is: by Pugio · 2004-10-19 09:04 · Score: 1

Ooops, I accidentally clicked on Submit as opposed to Preview. The question is can I easily port a Cocoa app to any of the other systems listed? Or, is Cocoa itself actually cross platform?

Re:WOOOPS Mis-Clicked. The question actually is: by Art+Tatum · 2004-10-21 14:04 · Score: 1

Cocoa is a set of object-oriented frameworks. GNUstep is a portable LGPL'd implementation of the same frameworks. So yes: you can take your source code and build it with GNUstep on UNIX systems. There are some caveats (some things aren't supported--mostly for IP reasons) and some things simply have to be done differently (Makefiles, GUIs). But it works.
One very promising framework is Renaissance. It's an XML-based format for describing user interfaces. It builds the interface at runtime, just like a NIB file does. But it has autolayout and is crossplatform.

Try GNUStep Live CD Re: Next by jmcgarey · 2004-10-19 09:15 · Score: 2, Informative

One way to check GNUStep out is by downloading and booting the GNUStep Live CD
Did no one think of this yet?

AT&T, also by itomato · 2004-10-19 09:18 · Score: 1

AT&T's corporate apps for in-house things like customer service apps for Cellular service, etc. were NeXTSTEP apps first, then they ported to OPENSTEP/NT, and now they are talking about going Cocoa ;)

Of course, it's all been watered down over the last few years, what with the rise of Siebel Systems, but it was cool as hell as a NeXT geek to go to AT&T and see and use OPENSTEP apps. People who got started on NeXT systems there even dragged their Windows start-bar-thingy to the right side of the screen, like the Dock :0

debian or the GNUStep Live CD by itomato · 2004-10-19 09:41 · Score: 1

Thanks to some dedicated people, GNUstep and a bunch of apps are an apt-get away on debian.

'apt-get install gnustep*' will install all the libraries, the development tools, stepbill.app, and some others. You'll want gworkspace, too. WindowMaker is nice to have, as well as this windowmaker theme and Camaelon.

Re:There was never anything so consistent, stable. by mrchaotica · 2004-10-19 12:35 · Score: 1

You can probably set up a dedicated key combination for it (maybe not 'Cmd' + '=', if that's what you meant, but at least something like Cmd+Option+'=') using Butler.

--

"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

Re:Responding to your sig: by BorgCopyeditor · 2004-10-19 12:54 · Score: 1

this is OT, but at least a Kerry administration will have the revenue to pay for such spending.

--
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.

Immortality by Pan+T.+Hose · 2004-10-19 13:21 · Score: 1

Is Windowmaker dead? (No, I'm not a troll.) The website hasn't been updated since February, I've gotten no CVS updates since July, there's been no official releases since 0.80.2, there's no working mailing list archives on the site, and my emails go unanswered.

First of all, Window Maker is quite a mature project in my opinion. Right now as we speak I am using even an older version 0.80.0-4 in Debian GNU/Linux (the stable Debian 3.0 "woody" which itself was released in July, 2002) and quite frankly I have never thought that I even needed any update. It's lightweight and rock-solid. Usually I have about 20 active workspaces with at least ten of them completely filled with tens of windows each, and it have never crashed since I started using it. And I've been using Window Maker exclusively on all of my desktops for at least five or six years (and in fact those were even older versions in Debian 2.2 "potato" and Debian 2.1 "slink"). I remember that switching from "potato" to "woody" I noticed few minor changes, mostly in Preferences Utility, if I remember correctly, but to be honest I'm not sure since I don't use it. Few years ago I was playing with Window Maker Themes but I observed that I am more productive without anime title bars and hentai background distracting me all the time, so after I got bored changing themes every day couple of years ago, I keep using one of the standard Styles, not Themes, and have blue solid backround and blue everything with very soft gradient but anything more fancy is just distracting becasue it makes me focus my attention outside of xterms instead of inside of them where it belongs, so it's quite pointless. Of course when I use Knoppix I always start it with knoppix desktop=wmaker, or at least always when I don't start it with knoppix 2, and using it I saw that icons are prettier and everything else seems the same. And quite frankly, I don't even want it to ever change, since I like it the way it is now. On the other hand I don't really care if it changes as long as I'll be able to use the old version in future Debians, and I know I will. I think all of you can already see my point. Window Maker is not dead, not because it is in active development, it doesn't even have to, but because it is immortal and cannot be killed at all, ever. As you see I will gladly keep using it even if no one develops it or even if I am the last and only user. I seriously couldn't care less what window managers other people use. It's not like I use it as a pick-up line or whatever.

I'm seriously interested in knowing. I'm a big Windowmaker fan, but I'm worried about its' apparent lack of development. Does anyone, anyone at all, know what the heck is going on?

I am a big fan of Window Maker either but I completely don't care about its development, just like I don't care much about the development of rxvt. Window Maker is exactly what I need and I'm quite sure I will keep using it even twenty years from now even if it doesn't change at all. I don't want it to change. I just want it to keep working. And I don't want it to be another KDE or Gnome. I don't even need other people using it, I don't need other people at all.

--
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."

10 the Magic Number by Pan+T.+Hose · 2004-10-19 13:50 · Score: 1

This is the 10th anniversary of OpenStep announcement on the GNUstep website:

10 the Magic Number

Today, the OpenStep API celebrates its 10th anniversary. What started out as a joint adventure of NeXT and SUN to define an application development standard that would run on all machines, making "write once compile everywhere" a reality, is still unfolding within the vivid and active community of GNUstep, old NeXT and Apple lovers.

The magic 10 appears in GNUstep's current 1.10.x release and in Apple's MacOS X "Cocoa" release. Programmers worldwide can develop their programs on Mac OS, Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and with a couple of hurdles -- even on Windows. This solid and well-defined standard is reaching out to the world of software development, slowly but surely.

Program your applications in days or weeks, rather than years or never. Use the advanced API of a development framework that hasn't needed significant modification for 10 years, because it rocks, is stable and just works.

Well said...

--
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."

GNUstep Live CD by Pan+T.+Hose · 2004-10-19 14:11 · Score: 2, Informative

It's a pity that, at the peak of the Linux desktop hype in the late 1990s, when evangelists predicted the near death of Microsoft, KDE and Gnome were rushed out of the door, and GNUstep development remained obscure.

Very true...

It is interesting to note that the new GNUstep Live CD was announced on GNUstep Core News in June:

What is it?
GNUstep Live CD contains a lot of software for GNUstep, a free implementation of the OPENSTEP framework (which was also the base as Cocoa in Mac OS X). Display Postscript is one of its powerful features. It includes an excellent application called Gorm for RAD (Apple Software Design Guidelines). More about the Objective-C Language.
Features
Software using GNUstep (Addresses, Agenda, AClock, Affiche, CamelBones, Camera, Charmap, Cenon, Connect, Cynthiune, DisplayCalibrator, EasyDiff, EdenMath, Gridlock, GMines, Gorm, Gomoku, GNUMail, GNUstep-icons, GNUWash, GWorkspace, HelpViewer, ImageViewer, LuserNET, MPDCon, ProjectCenter, PRICE, Poe, Preferences, PlopFolio, Preview, Renaissance, Stepulator, StepTalk, StepBill, Terminal, TalkSoup, TextEdit, ViewPDF, VolumeControl, Waiho, WildMenus, Zipper)
In development and not yet on the CD (3DKit, AgentFarms, Burn / CDPlayer, Duncan, Emacs on GNUstep, Encod, Expense, GTAMS, GRASStep GIS, GShisen, GNUstepWeb (WebObjects 4.x), GNUstepWrapper, ILogin, Installer, InnerSpace, LaTeX Service, Localize, MusicKit, MyWiki / MyLibrary, ModPlugPlay, Paje, Pixen, Popup, Position, Rhydot / Skfxdemo, RSS Reader, WebKit / SimpleWWW, Tryst)
The currently used window manager is Window Maker.
Rescue System (lde, gpart, parted, grub, raidtools, portmap, nfs-common, QTParted)
3d Software Blender, Wings3d, Games NetHack, Jump n Bump and SuperTux, LaTeX, TeXmacs, Emacs, GIMP2
Tools (screen, irssi-text, ngrep, tcpdump, openssl, ssh, imagemagick, netpbm, nail, iptraf, mc, gnupg, ibackup, cowsay, hdparm, feh, tetradraw)
The Debian GNU/Hurd K6 mini.iso for easy installation in /cdrom/hurd
C Compiler and development environment
Webbrowsers (dillo, links2), TV Software (xawtv, alevt)
Some music (www.chiptune.com, www.maktone.tk)

This is a very interesting project, though of course not as popular as Knoppix.

It was the first time that distributed free software development defected from its proven practice of implementing standardized, proven APIs and technology (like POSIX) and created major APIs of its own. [...] Imagine the massive development efforts on KDE and Gnome, including the massive rewrites of their codebases, would instead had gone into GNUstep, so that the GNU/Linux and *BSD desktop would be OS X/Cocao source compatibile today [and companies developing for OS X port their software to Linux basically with one more compiler run]...

Imagine the efforts on Knoppix would instead had gone into GNUstep Live CD... Imagine the development efforts on Linux would instead had gone into The Hurd... Just imagine... The entire computing world as we know it would be completely different. But what do we expect? People have no idea that GNU even exists, let alone the kernel development! Just few days ago Slashdot posted a story about the Seattle Times interview with Linus Torvalds with this opening paragraph: "Linus Torvalds [pronounced LEE-nus] started a revolution of sorts in the computer industry when he created the Linux operating system and decided to share it with fellow programmer

--
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."

History for GnuStep, started in particle physics by qromodyn · 2004-10-19 14:15 · Score: 1

GnuStep started out as a project to port a particle physics analysis program from a NeXT to a Sun. Paul Kunz, from SLAC, was one of the founders of the GnuStep project. I helped out a very little bit, back in the mid 90s since I really wanted to use that program for my PhD thesis. The name of the program was Hippoplotamus. At somepoint, Paul Kunz gave up and rewrote the application in Quicktime.

Good Ideas by militiaMan · 2004-10-19 15:24 · Score: 0

I had professors that would always talk about the innovations moved forward by NextStep. I to think it is important to give notice to innovative ideas that didn't get popularized. All good ideas will have their day under the sun.

Pithy little rant from the Ivory Tower by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-19 22:52 · Score: 0

Charming.

Now let me tell you how it works in the real world.

If you're not operating out of your garage, nor from some prima-donna sequestered corner of a company where you can dictate that everyone write in your One True Pure Language, you've got to solve real problems, with real deadlines.

And when you need to add people to your team, you can't afford to pay triple the going rate for competent programmers, just to fly in someone who happens to be an expert in your blown-out-the-Ass-of-God language.

The popular programming languages were developed with real world needs and goals in mind. Further, not every programmer is going to be a Good one, and that's something you have to account for, and manage in your development process.

There's plenty of chores to be done by the monkey-coders who didn't finish their MSCS and write their own scheduling algorithms. And that means hiring trade-school grads who know the One Popular Language Du Jour.

And while you're hammering out your 21st century version of the Lisp Machine failures, these real-world companies will continue to rake in the cash, and their CTOs will drive by your bicycle in their BMWs.

Re:Write once run anywhere will *NEVER* happen by babyblink · 2004-10-20 22:49 · Score: 1

Very true, even you managed to get a notebook and successfully run something on Mars, that doesn't mean you can run it under St. Helen or on Pluto.

--
[self dealloc];

338 comments