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GNUstep Project Gets New Chief Maintainer
stivi writes "OSNews is reporting that Gregory Casamento has accepted the position of GNUstep Maintainer. Adam Fedor, former GNUstep leader writes: 'After over 15 years of being the Chief Maintainer for GNUstep, I've found I have too many other responsibilities to devote as much time to GNUstep as is necessary. I still plan on contributing to GNUstep in the future in a lower capacity.' Gregory has been a prolific developer for GNUstep for the past seven years and is currently the maintainer for Gorm (the graphical interface designer) and the GUI library. I think he will make a great choice to lead GNUstep in the future. New plans for change have been set up already. Thank you Adam for the past, congratulations Gregory to the future."
So if GNUStep is just an Open Source version of something that is obsolete, why care at all?
Well, if you care whether Linux is going to make a dent in Microsoft's market share, you should care very much about GNUStep. For my part, I'll just keep using the Mac, so GNUStep is mostly a matter of nostalgia.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
People who value a nice, open development environment and the integrated and synergistic environment which such creates. Consider a typical work-flow in NeXTstep:
.tex file from the TeXview.app window .eps of the typeset equation (you can send the source to a background layer for reference (what I usually do) or delete it.
0 )
:( having them on the left means a window is more useful when partially dragged off-screen and results in less-frequent need to resize a window
- write an article in TeXview.app
- select a word, hit = and get a definition / thesaurus entry while writing it
- create a drawing in Altsys Virtuoso which needs an equation in a label
- copy the proper equation out of your
- paste in the equation into Altsys Virtuoso
- invoke the Service TeX eq -> eps in Altsys Virtuoso and get a
- select the address of the journal receiving the article
- invoke Poste.app to bring up a window from you you can print an envelope to mail it for submission
The environment affords similar integration w/ Mail.app as well if desired.
The commercial developer Nova Mind, http://www.nova-mind.com/ uses it to get a Windows version of their Mac OS X software.
And for those who say just use Mac OS X (I do at work):
(from: http://macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=4190&cid=6359
- monolithic main menu bar w/ wasted blank space between the menus and the (optional) information / settings menus for Airport &c.
- verbose Mac-style shortcut descriptions w/ arcane symbols instead of concise NeXT-style shortcuts (in NeXTstep, Save is indicated by ``s'' and Save as by ``S'', no Command symbol (it's assumed---Control only as a modifier is reserved for personal shortcuts / Unix-use), Shift by case)
- Print, Hide, Services and Quit are no longer top-level menus where they made more sense and were quicker to get at.
- scroll bars on wrong side (this can't be fixed by theming 'cause Carbon apps are responsible for deciding where scroll bars are placed
- no Webster.app (this has since been addressed w/ 10.4), Digital Librarian / Shakespeare or Oxford's Book of Quotations --- in NeXTstep this meant one was guaranteed to have Command = _not_ used in an app so it'd be available for looking things up in Websters
- Pantone colour library --- used to be this was licensed w/ the system, now each graphic app which needs it has to pay a license, and one _doesn't_ get them in one's office apps (major negative for adhering to corporate identity programs where such is specced)
- vertical menu
- pop-up main menu --- this is wonderfully fast / efficient / elegant. For me, ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuoso is pretty much a gesture, right-click, down a bit, then straight over and release
- repositionable sub-menus --- no need for inscrutable button bars, and one can make a given command easy to get to as needed (when doing lots of envelopes I tear off the poste.app Services menu, put it in the bottom left corner, then an envelope is merely a selection, mouse move to bottom left, click, shift right to the print menu (also aligned on the bottom edge for this) click away. (takes longer to say / type than to do)
William
(who really should save all that and put it on a web page or something instead of typing it up each time --- check my rants at http://groups.google.com/ in comp.sys.next.advocacy to see if I forgot anything...)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Their annoying usage of a top level conf dir ~/GNUStep (or whatever it is). No other app I've seen does such garbage, dot-dirs all ftw.
Don't forget in-house custom app development. The easier it is to develop an app for a given platform, the better chance that platform has of being chosen. My company is a Mac shop, but if there was a 80+% Cocoa library available for Linux, we might very well choose Linux for certain vertical-market deployments. As it is, the GNUStep foundation makes Linux a possibility for our non-GUI apps (data acquisition, etc.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Think commercial apps. The Objective-C and Foundation platform would look a lot better then .NET if it works on all platforms. The speed of native code, the FFI abilities of C, and the flexibility of Smalltalk vs. the speed of Java, the FFI abilities of Java, and the flexibility of Java with even less cross platform support. Only additional thing Objective-C needs is Lisp for it to be perfect.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Microsoft is certainly one offender, and certainly the largest, but let's not forget our dear friend, X11. Pre-Irix-4.0 SGI ran NeWS, which was also display postscript based. Nexts ran NextStep, VAXStations VWS, all relatively light, efficient, and functional, and everywhere I went the same whine arose, "we can't use this, it doesn't run X11!" So, Nexts weren't purchased, even though given the software and performance, they weren't out of line versus Sun 3/60, Apollo, etc, and SGI had to port everything to X in order to survive. We took a performance hit on every machine that had to run X versus the previous window-manager, had to add megs of expensive (early 1990s) memory just to not hear the disks whine, and generally gained very little in return for adopting this, ahem, standard. Then, if you wanted to see real death by toolkit, running Motif on a Vaxstation 3100/38 that had run smoothly under previous versions of X alone was a good example. We had a program that *somebody* insisted had to be Motif only, and the performance was so apalling we spent ~$15K on an Indy, just to be able to work. That VAX was perfectly fine (and would have still been useful if the programs the lab used had an X11-only, VWS, or even Tek-4107 interface), but it had to be retired due to a bloated toolkit.
The Knight with the Chicken is going to be very busy in the computer industry one of these days.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
I've been casually flollowing the etoile development, and I've even gone so far as to (mostly successfully) build GNUStep and Etoile on my OS X-running Powerbook. It's clear that GNUStep has made some strides in recent times. Etoile seems to be proving that there are some with a vision of what a GNUStep *platform* could be. All in all, pretty exciting stuff.
./configure, make, make install... I'd like to see someone pick a reference platform and target it for continuous integration that closely tracks Etoile and GNUStep development. My personal favorite would be some kind of BSD, however, I'm a pragmatist and realize that Ubuntu is probably the logical choice for such a task given its ubiquity and its history of eventually making 1st class citizens of derivatives (kubuntu, edubuntu, xubuntu, etc).
The catch is, that integrating this stuff is a bit more work than your average
Fact is, I think that we'd start seeing more apps show up for GNUStep if we had a supported reference platform. You know, give developers some place where they could port their apps over from Mac OS X in peace without having to worry about spending "hacking day" compiling software rather than writing it.
. Penguins Surely Ca