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GORM 1.0 Release to Take on GNOME/KDE?
qa'lth writes "Today marks the occasion of the release of Gorm 1.0, the Interface Builder for the GNUstep project, and with its release, comes the obsolesence of the GNOME and KDE projects. Finally, today, Free Software users can enjoy the power of a well-designed, powerful object-oriented system derived from OpenStep, legacy to the acclaimed MacOSX, through GNUstep, our loving reimplementation of the OpenStep standard."
Having set the expectation with references to OSX, why don't they have any drop dead gorgeous screenshots instead of one very dated looking one? I had high hopes that got dashed with WTF?
Fnord! Any sufficiently undocumented code is indistinguishable from magic.
Guess this was a joke. :-)
However, is it possible to reimplement the Mac OS X APi based on GNUStep?
I think three things will really help GNUstep. the first it the ability to read nib files. If GORM can load a OSX nib file, it will allows people to port the thousands of OSX apps they have made to GNUstep. Second, if they chnaged their target to Cocoa (link it to a version of OSX and release new versions with each release to add features).
The third and final thing is the appearance. GNUstep will never be popular looking thw way it does now. The default look looks too much like 1994 and unfortunately, many people will judge it based on that.
OSX + linux cross platform development would be a HUGE boost to linux.
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Why waste time trying to make my desktop work and act like Windows(tm)(r)(C)(and possible 666) when all I really want is to get my work done without all the bling?
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However, gnustep has been themed, and it can look pretty good. From a UI perspective, I really like how consistent and polished the interface is, even when it's in the default "prosaic" grey. And it's not only easy to learn, it's also easy to use. From a usability perspective, I think it's much more intelligently designed than Gnome or KDE.
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Then the guy must have a very good sense of irony ;) It is interesting to see how (at the moment) slashdot tries to decide whether it was a joke or not :)) I wonder which reading of this story will win out :) Currently I can't decide - but yeah, at first sight, it didn't occur to me that it was a joke :)
I'm not a developer - but follow the development of various desktop closely (mainly KDE and enlightenment). I'm also a thinkerer, and I like to try out alternative desktops once in a while, including Afterstep, windowmaker, and the likes (that follow the same UI paradigm seen in gnustep) - and I noticed that there was very little or no development at all of these desktops in the past few (3-4) years. I have to admit that both wmaker and afterstep are different from other desktopts, but I won't apostrophize that difference as revolutionary. And I don't see where it would take (even with rapid development tools) the current desktop paradigms (or how it compares to future ones, like plasma). In short: I don't see the vision, the why this is soo cool aspect. You wrote: "From a usability perspective, I think it's much more intelligently designed than Gnome or KDE." - yeah, but whose usability? It is really really difficult to define an objective usability perspective. I don't dispute your claim, I just don't understand it :))
GNUstep is exactly how we ported Oolite (an open source game for Mac OS X) to Linux and FreeBSD. There were a few small issues to contend with (and we eventually went from using NSOpenGLView for the graphics to SDL) but 99% of the code is identical on OS X and Linux.
It's a pity that GNOME was written way back when instead of GNUstep being the free desktop of choice - had all that effort gone into GNUstep, it would have been pretty easy to target both Mac OS X and Linux/*BSD instead of having to write separate UI code for each.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
..by far, the best "pseudo-programming" environment I've ever worked in was LiteStep for Windows. I just made the switch to Linux last year, and I have yet to find a tool as valuable as LiteStep, and frankly, I was surprised that there weren't more modular, easily modifiable interface creation systems like this one. Both Gnome and KDE felt like a step back when I started with the penguin. A s much as I enjoy learning about programming, as a lawyer, I really don't have time to learn about stacks and arrays and pointers and object classes. But an environment like LiteStep, where I can create and specify scriptable actions for things like buttons in "dang-near-english--" e.g. ButtonXLength 10 ButtonXWidth 20 ButtonXText "Press to start firefox" ButtonXAction !Execute "C:/firefox.exe" This is perfect. And also the kind of thing that I imagine hardcore programmers hate, but it's precisely this level of control that us Linux folks (yes, I'm counting myself among you's guys) can use as a real big selling point OVER M$. I will be trying out this Gorm ASAP.
Theme engines dont make a desktop look better. They just look like variations of the same thing. Look at the Gtk theme engines. They dont make that much difference. It all looks pretty much the same at the end of the day. (That being said, Gnome looks pretty famn decent. The theme engines only make the slightest difference)
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Did you notice that there's actually sound (as in me, talking and making sense of all the mousewaving) in those videos ? :-)
what I'm seeing here is Visual Basic, with object orientation. Not to knock it because of this.
Frankly, no, it's vastly different. Or, in a way, yes, it's "VB with object orientation"... but:
So yes, it's "VB with OO" if you want to see it that way :-D but it's FAR from following the "VB paradigm".
That's like a Windows user saying the command prompt sucks because all they're used to is DOS. Any great idea can be implemented poorly.
Good luck to them with the Cocoa compatibility.
The problem is that Cocoa is a moving target. Mac OS X 10.3 had a major update when they added in Data Bindings along with associated technologies of Key-Value Observing, Key-Value Coding and Key-Value Validation. 10.4 has had the addition of Core Data - there's quite a few new classes in that lot.
With a bit of luck though Gorm will get people more enthusiastic about GNUstep and bring more developers along to work on the core APIs, helping to fill in the gaps in Cocoa compatibility.
These problems could be addressed in Linux/X11. The way to do it is to redefine middle-mouse-click as "drop the most recent selection". This just happens to match what xterm/etc do and that many people mistakenly call the cut & paste X function. Because of this X programs are much more likely to be able to get this enhancement because they tend not to have use the middle mouse for anything else.
Because you can rearrange, open/close, and otherwise manipulate windows between the selection and the "drop", this addresses all your concerns about DnD.
What I suggest is that every toolkit or system that implements drag & drop be written so that middle-mouse-click acts exactly as though you dragged from the most recently selected thing and dropped it. For text this is not very hard because it would use the "PRIMARY" selection. For other data this may require programs that select items that can be dragged to also update the primary selection.
I use drag and drop a lot when using Mac OS X simply because it works so well. Dragging files to the trash, dragging files to applications to open them, dragging images off web pages to save them etc..
Just because Windows (and therefore Linux, as sadly the linux desktops have heavily copied windows as opposed to OS X) can't do drag and drop effectively
Odd, every one of the examples you mentioned works in MY Windows. Have you screwed yours up somehow or are you using some bizarre version? Perhaps you meant to bring up some of the actual problems with windows drag and drop (there are one or two, but it's hardly "broken")?