Re: curious outsider: media kits, etc

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

You should check out the MusicKit (http://www.musickit.org).  It is a kit for 
writing music apps, along with the SndKit for sound, which is currently part of 
the MusicKit.

I definitely agree with your summary of Linux.  There is a lot of software 
available for linux now, but it seems that open-source development ususally 
lacks the discipline to make such a large project well organized, even with the 
help of companies like Mandrake, RedHat, etc.  It seems to me that Debian is 
going in the right direction, but it still has a ways to go. Personally, I am 
hoping for a open-source NeXTSTEP/OS X.

.hc


Message: 10
From: Steve_Tekell@Dell.com
To: discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
Subject: curious outsider: media kits, etc
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 10:37:56 -0600 

I heard of GnuStep awhile back, but I am not familiar with the OpenStep or
MacOS X (APIs, programming, that is).  I finally got around to installing
Linux (Mandrake 8.1) recently.  I had some familiarity with Unix/Linux, but
hadn't tried to run Linux in years.  Anyway, it pretty much made me to want
cry or puke or something.  What a chaotic nightmare.  It was nice to see so
many relative good apps like the KDE stuff, but there so much garbage,
clutter, confusion, etc.  It's bad enough that things don't always work, but
there is a dozen ways to do something, each work some of the time, but even
the same time as one another.  

So anway, I am trying to get a grip of the vision/scope of GnuStep and
direction it's headed.  I just noticed "SimplyGnuStep" and found the idea
intriguing.  Does GnuStep hope to be a compete environment, sort of a open
source MacOS X?  Or does it only seek to be a something like a platform
within platforms (like yellowbox I guess)?  I am guessing that OpenStep
doesn't include installation/configuration/system maintenance kind of stuff.
If not, does GnuStep hope to design and develop such things so as to make it
a complete well designed system?

Along those lines, how much of an abstraction in GnuStep on top of the OS?
Does the scope include ways of configuring hardware, especially multimedia
hardware and the stuff beyond the essential boot hardware like harddisk and
video?

Media Kits
One thing that sounded interesting to me was the way BeOS did/does approach
multimedia in regards to streams and nodes.  That is, any program written to
it's media kit APIs, can plug in/out of another.  Start some  app, start
another an apply effects to the first, neither of which had to be coded for
the other.

I don't think MacOS X has this, or does it?  Does GnuStep offer something
similar?
What is GnuStep like in terms of media kits?
At a glance I see plenty of things to write say a desktop publishing app
(staying inside the box), but I am curious about audio/video APIs.

If I wanted to develop multmedia apps for GnuStep today, would it work (or
even be better) to just do it for MacOS X and stick to a some subset of APIs
and eventually just recompile one day under GnuStep?  Or would there be
significant rework in regards to multimedia hardware code (if OpenStep
doesn't fully address these areas).

How pervasive is multi-threading in GnuStep?  If just write an app with
mutiple "views" or "frames" or whatever you'd call them in a window, would I
get some multi-threading for free?

Anyway, just looking out in the world, I am curious about a few areas where
I might focus some projects, like (Open)BeOS, MacOS X, and now GnuStep.  I
sort of what the best of it all, open source, nice modern OS, Objective-C
(or something better than C++ pointerville), Java-support, rich multimedia
APIs, over all well designed complete system.   Any insight or opinion on
some of these things would be appreciated and enjoyed.



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