Re: Extremely poor quality of GNUStep applications

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

You can read the SWI contents from 

http://www.gnustep.org/softwareindex/plist.php

as a Property List (NSArray arrayWithContentsOfURL) and display / filter / search

it in a convenient way (NSTableView). Double-Clicking could take the URL and

load the files (NSURLConnection)...

Should not be very complex. Volunteers?

When we first discussed SWI (years ago) the concept of an "app store" was already there, long before Apple put it in on the Macintosh.

We have an intermediate problem which would be an installer and/or a way of building packages from source.

One of the never implemented apps of GAP is an installer. The two things should work together.

Since our "Browser" is called "Vespucci", we could find a name going in a

similar direction. Named after Someone/thing who provides many useful things...

Some (not filtered) ideas:

* Warehouse.app

* Horreum.app (Latin)

* Fugger.app (14th century trade imperium, Germany)

* ACME.app

* Everything.app

...

Fondaco.app (the Ventian trade houses... the german had one too :)

Fugger.app is nice :)

Hansa.app
Negotium.app
...

Who takes the soccer ball to keep it rolling?

Maybe a small pet project.

Since I think we will never have a single "application project", we need some sort

of well maintained "App distributions" which have a quality gate and cherry pick

all the good apps out there. Etoile and GAP are such "productivity and user

experience" projects and SWI is a techical tool to support this (probably not the

best one, but better than none - and see above)...

Yes, that is a problem. This is where SWI can be an umbrella over different projects.

Etoile or GAP can't be "the app store" as some suggests, since the way they guarantee the quality of the software is by maintaining it. I can't speak for Etoile, but GAP doesn't incorporate "all apps" unmaintained out there for different reasons. If they don't fit its paradigm is the official answer. But there is also the burden of actually maintaining it. GAP goes beyond a mere testing.

Riccardo