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First Impressions of GNUStep


From: Raphael Bosshard
Subject: First Impressions of GNUStep
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 23:39:05 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030610

Hello there!

I just recently discovered GNUStep, so some of the impressions may be inaccurate or even wrong, but people judge by first impressions. And because you can't gain some first impressions on GNUStep again, I will try to provide you with the thoughts and impressions of a first time GNUStep user.

(There was a thread in the mailing list archives, the title was something like "Why has GNUStep not as many users as KDE or Gnome" or something alike. This mail also tries to answer that question and tries provide some ideas deal with these "problems".)

Everything written here is my opinion, so please, take no offence.

First Impressions:
- Where is the taskbar, dammit? It's quite a change if you are used to Gnome (in my case) or KDE. Heck, even OSX has a "taskbar" these days.

- Windows covering other windows of the same application. OSX (and partly MS Windows with windows that don't apprear in the taskbar) has the same problem: There are two problems with this situation: You have to know that there is a window beneath the window. And to bring this window to the top, you must first move the covering windows. Neither Gnome nor KDE have this "problem" because the only windows not appearing in the taskbar are modal.

(This one is quite tricky. Have to talk to some of the other students tomorrow on how to solve this. Do it like KDE, all windows in the taskbar? or like OSX, a single icon for the applications brings all windows to front. But how to access covered windows in this case? Tricky...)

- Strange menubar (NSMenu). Perhaps it's just me, but it gets always in my way. I'd prefere a OSX solution. The menubar (in my humble conditioned opinion) should stick somewhere where it doesn't interfere with the other application windows. And it should probably be horizontal aligned - it's more desktop-space preserving this way. I don't see the use of tear-off/detachable menues. GTK had/has the same feature but they may be going to disable it per default. (There was a discussion about that topic a while ago, but I don't know what the current oppinion is)

- Accessability. There should be more keyboard support, for lists and such stuff. This is the one area where Gnome is superior to all other desktops, even OSX and Windows. ATK did it's job good.

- Applications: There are very few native GNUStep-Applications and there is no "killer-application" that would propagate GNUStep. But maybe there will appear some opensource/free software OSX applications that can be ported to GNUStep. Who knows.

(I'd like to try a native GNUStep-Browser, probably with khtml - Apple already did a great job by providing the wrappers to ObjC.)

- Look and Feel. GNUStep feels and looks like a desktop of the nineties. Maybe it should follow the path of OSX. Or try something completly new. But that is just the opinion of an ignorant, un-enlightend and stupid hollow head.

Splitting the GNUStep-Project into two seperate projects (GNUStep Framework and GNUStep Desktop) would be a good idea.

Last, but not least: GNUStep is no eye-candy. Really. Maybe a new default theme would help here. Or some new icons. There was an interesting proposal at OSNews some time ago. Maybe some of Eugenia's ideas could be incorporated.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3725

Questions:
- How difficult would it be to implement gnome-vfs-like features. Could gnome-vfs even used for stuff like smb/bzip/ftp-browsing?

- Does GNUStep intent to support freedesktop.org?

- Should GNUStep be a unix-hacker only desktop or also a desktop for Uncle Tom?

- What is the state of Apple's NextStep-extentions like drawers? Do you plan to implement them?


I hope you don't take my heretic thoughts to serious.

Have fun,
Raphael






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