Re: The Path of GNUstep (Was: Re: Gnustep + mac + windows? Possib le?)

[Nicolas Roard]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 07:31:58PM +0100, Pete French wrote:

> Themes are pointless window dressing. No point in it looking good if it
> doesnt run the code. Cross platform abilities is our best Unique Selling Point
> really. Not only is it a fantastic ddevelopment environment but you
> can write once and then deploy on UNIX / Linux / OSX / Windows.
> 
> That a good feature. That will lead to people adopting it. being ale
> to continue deploying my old OpenStep code is my motivation for being
> involved in this, and I would love to be able to do so under Windows
> without having to rip off vopies of YellowBox in order to do so...

Well it's not that simple... take wxwindows for example : it's an existing, 
working and useable cross platform library. But is that feature leads to
a major wave of people adopting it ? well, not really... 

Same for themes. It's all eye-candy, and not add a cent to the usability
of a program. But people want it, bad or not.

What I want to point, is that, for _you_, cross platform ability is THE
major selling point. But it's not the only truth : others people like
the NeXTish look, others the great object oriented frameworks, others,
the possibility of developping apps quickly with Gorm, or the
distributed objects features, etc.

In fact, what's interessting about GNUstep, is that it's a mix of all 
thoses things.

We program free software on our free time... at least, I think people 
should be able to program and help on the topic they *want* ;)

Of course, fixing bugs will be great. As cross platform. And, I will
say, even theme support. 

I found the NeXT UI really stylish and nice, but, from my own experience, 
I can tell you the FIRST comment about GNUstep you heard when you show it 
to people, is the fact that the look is to "greyish", "old", etc. 

That's their first impression, and it impacts the way they see GNUstep.
With KDE/Gnome existing, it's quite hard to interesst people to 
still another desktop/library. It's harder when you have an exotic
programming language. And harder when you have a GUI people found 
"too old". 

If you disagree, try to ask you WHY GNUstep still isn't
widely adopted, and younger desktop/environment as KDE/Gnome had
take the lead. My opinion is that it's because NeXT wasn't known
by many; it was famous, but not so many people *used* it. So people
have a hard time to figure in what GNUstep would be interessting,
when you compare it to a more known environment/philosophy/language,
with approximately the same features.

I think we'll agree that GNUstep is far, far better, than many
others environments (at least, in concept ;)
But what we miss, is people interessted enough to invest 
themselves in GNUstep programming.

In that optic, creating new informations sites, or show GNUstep
to people, or try to stick -- as possible it is -- with Cocoa,
or themes, are just some ways which could leads to a bigger
interesst on GNUstep.

Just my .2 cents.

> 
> -bat.

-- 
Nicolas Roard <nicolas@roard.com>