Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

[Jamie Ramone]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Michael Thaler
<michael.thaler@physik.tu-muenchen.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> Because it has professional look and feel. I don't like any theme for Qt
>> or GTK+.
>
> Sorry, I don't buy that a professional look has to be gray and dull.
> For Qt/KDE there is a CDE theme. But I doubt that many people use it.

The gray and dull has nothing to do with it but, rather, the lack of
glitter. I happen to work for a big company and while we use PCs with
Windows XP (using it's default theme), the tools made specifically for
us use the old Win NT look from the mid 90's. In fact one monitoring
tool remotely running on some UNIX system and it's made with Motif.
I've never seen any professional use glittery interfaces, they go for
more neutral looking ones.

>> Finally maybe you want Leopard look of GNUstep applications as default?
>
> Having a MacBook with Snow Leopard, yes I would love to have a Linux desktop
> looking as elegant and polished as Snow Leopard.

No argument there, everyone has different taste. So this is a case, in
my own opinion, to favour skins in GNUstep as done via Chameleon for
instance.

>> WindowMaker is window manager, it's not DE. People tend to use desktop
>> environment.
>
> I know. But how many people use WindowMaker with KDE or Gnome?
>
>> What are they interested in? Let me guess: Qt(KDE) or GTK(GNOME)?
>
> My former institute used KDE as desktop. But people usually worked with
> Mathematica or MatLab. If we did coding it was mostly low-level numerical 
> stuff
> in Fortran, C or C++. I doubt that it is a good idea to target researchers
> with gnustep. What advantage would gnustep give them?

No less than the ones you mentioned, and more considering GNUstep is
way more advanced in terms of usability and consistency.

>> So we need MacOS style GUI, right?
>
> In my personal opinion it would be nice to have a MacOS X style GUI. But I
> know this is a matter of taste and not everyone things that the MacOS X GUI is
> great.

Agreed.

>> Another day Apple discards GCC in favor of LLVM. We need to quickly adopt
>> this
>> change after Apple? That's why GNUstep in it's current state today.
>
> Well, for me llvm and having a garbage collector and blocks would make gnustep
> much more interesting.

Maybe, maybe not. After studying the Grand Central Dispatch docs, I
realized I could implement the whole thing without the need for
compiler awareness (i.e. as a pure library, no ^ operator). The only
thing it would miss would be the environment snapshots, but this
property is not essential. And such code could also be (partly)
included in the GCC so one could end up having blocks with compiler
awareness. And considering that the GCC is freedomware, and can thus
have new features added any time, I don't see it as being THAT much
behind some other compilers. As for GC, do you REALLY want that? I
think it's way overrated. It tends to encourage bad programming
practices, and usually kills performance.

>> And I see no problem using Opera or Firefox. That is the problem I'm trying
>> to attract attention: GNUstep developers always ready to start
>> mega-projects
>> but only few individuals trying to make GNUstep finished.
>
> There is no problem using Opera or Firefox with gnustep, except they do not
> integrate well. But what is acutally the point of using gnustep/etoile as a
> desktep and then using Opera or Firefox? And what about an office suite? a 
> good
> mail client (well, I don't know how good Mail.app is).
>
> My personal plan is to port an open source application from MacOS X to gnustep
> because I think without applications noone will use gnustep. Unfortunately I
> am currently quite busy at work, so that I don't have much time.

Excelent! Mondo coolness! Party on Mike!

> Greetings,
> Michael
>
>
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-- 
Besos, abrazos, confeti y aplausos.
Jamie Ramone
"El Vikingo"