On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 09:43, Riccardo Mottola
<riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:
Hi,
This post cries for trolling, however since I very much agree that Apple is dumbing down Mac to be like an iPhone in every detail of its interface and that it lost its consistency and ease of use years ago and goes worse and worse with each release done since 10.3, I wonder how this affects GNUstep.
I agree that some of the areas look like they'll get worse in Lion than in Snow Leopard, but up to Snow Leopard, I have seen only positive movements. Bad things have happened primarily in the API area such as removal of context menus in Finder, and several other features breaking SCPlugin (Finder-integrated SVN client) completely. Even those bad things are overwhelmed by positive movements, and every now and then I run into a useful API that does not exist in 10.4, or was added in 10.4.
As I said, I fear for Lion; I have not used its beta yet, but from what Apple's announcing, in the UI features I will mostly appreciate the new Expose. Other things? Not so much.
I use GNUstep daily. While we surely add APIs coming from Cocoa, we are very careful in changing the interface and the user experience.
Careful changes are good. But someone should perhaps try and organize sessions with Windows, OS X, Gnome and KDE users, and observe them trying to get along with GNUstep apps, either in the "full GNUstep environment" (such as WindowMaker + GWorkspace + apps, or perhaps Etoile) or integrated with their favorite environment.
I run GWorkspace, Terminal and several end-user applications and their appearance changed little, new features try to blend in.
So if you want your *rant* to be just somewhat constructive, please detail.
Here's one concrete example: when using Terminal on OS X, I like using "cd " + drag'n'drop of folder to quickly go into a folder I am looking at in Finder. On GNUstep, one cannot use this method if there are spaces in the folder name: on OS X, spaces and other special symbols get prepended with backslash, and on GNUstep and in its Terminal, they do not.
GNUstep apps are currently a minority; perhaps some work should be done on improving drag'n'drop integration with Gnome and KDE, as well as integration with their window management. If I remember correctly, I think all GNUstep windows got assigned non-app-specific group, getting gnome-panel to group all different apps together. Maybe I remember incorrectly.
I wish I had a million bucks to be able to work on all the things I want to work on, instead of all the things I must work on.
--
Regards,
Ivan Vučica