Re: FOSDEM roundup

[Ivan Vučica]

On 9. vel. 2011., at 13:23, David Chisnall wrote:

> 
>> So I guess some tutorial like sessions would come handy next time. I can 
>> imagine sessions like: "Creating cross plattform applications with GNUstep – 
>> a primer", "Using Gorm to create a cross plattform GUI", "Objective-C tips 
>> and tricks", "Objective-C for C++ programmers – the differences, the 
>> similarities" or "Useful frameworks helping you to create your application – 
>> an overview" or the like. Maybe that would be not to interesting for 
>> seasoned GNUstep developers but we're doing the whole event not just for us.
> 
> I think that's a good idea.  We should probably regard the devroom as more of 
> an advertising opportunity than as a place for communication between 
> developers.

All of this, plus let's not forget that GNUstep could benefit from online 
illustrated and/or video tutorials on creating simple apps, and an improved 
documentation browser. (GnomeTheme already makes apps look lovely and 
relatively integrated!)

Getting a simple NSDocument-based app to work would be an awesome exercise and 
tutorial. If the tutorial also contained an overview of hyper-useful stuff such 
as outline views, table views, et cetera -- well, that would already mean a 
lot. Explaining nib concepts such as File's Owner, class definitions in nibs, 
et cetera from the point of view of Gorm and GNUstep might mean a lot in 
GNUstep's popularization not only among FLOSS developers, but among others. 
Both FOSDEM workshops and online tutorials are important -- and the tutorials 
themselves could be a good reference.

I remember that getting started with Zcode was exercise in forcing oneself to 
read tons of long documentation and understanding how GNUstep's concepts differ 
from Apple's. (I've mostly had issue connecting outlets in Gorm, and 
understanding that I actually had to update classes in Gorm as well.)

>  We reserved a timeslot for us to discuss how to go about adding UIKit 
> support to GNUstep, but only about a quarter of the people in the room at the 
> time were GNUstep developers, so we couldn't do much meaningful discussion.

Getting UIKit into GNUstep would be awesome; if not the entirety of it, at 
least wrappers that use equivalent AppKit classes. Something like what UMeKit 
is doing, but more complete (covering buttons et al as well).

--
Regards,
Ivan Vučica
ivan@vucica.net - http://ivan.vucica.net/

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