Gorm Status 04-03-2005: Recent new features and some upcoming changes

[Gregory John Casamento]

All,

Lots of news...

1) Gorm now has a full implementation of canSubstituteForClass: which is used
to determine if a class can be substituted in the custom class inspector.   
This allows classes added in palettes to say whether or not they can be used as
a subsitute for a kit class.

2) Better separation of Gorm into libraries, thanks to urging by Nicola ;).  As
well as the ability to compile on windows with a simple: "make install"

3) Implementation of IBResourceManager class.  This class is used by palettes
to register drag types to be considered by the top level editors in the
document window: object, sound, image, class.

4) Gorm now is able to switch views in the document window when you drag a file
into it.  If it's an image it will switch to the image view, if it's a sound,
the sound view, an object the object view etc or if it's a class (a .h file) it
will switch to the classes view.

5) Drag and drop parsing of header files (if you hadn't gathered from the
previous item).

6) Better support for standalone views.  while the user cannot instantiate from
the classes view (too many problems with this).  They can now drag any view
from the palette into the objects view and have it work.

7) A myriad of bug fixes.

----------------
Upcoming changes....
----------------

There is a missing feature currently in Gorm and that is the ability to
autoposition windows.   I am implementing this in Gorm and in the GNUstep
templates.

This is going to require a revision of the GSWindowTemplate version, since some
new data is going to be stored.   I am working to make this as smooth and as
easy as possible.

---------------
keyed gorms/nib compatibility
---------------
I haven't had as much time to devote to this front as I would have liked, but
it's progressing in gui thanks to Fred and RFM.   I will start working on this
more actively in the future as this is the key to forward and backward
compatibility as well as cross platform compatibility with OSX.

Thanks, GJC



Gregory John Casamento 
-- CEO/President Open Logic Corp. (A MD Corp.)
## Maintainer of Gorm (IB Equiv.) for GNUstep.