Re: Plans for ahead

[Alessandro Sangiuliano]

@Adam,

Is what, most of the time do!
I don't like grayscale theme, so I wrote a new theme with another person, based on OS X. It also is a way to show GNUstep potential.
I received contribution on the art side (icons and others) by Bertrand Deckoninck. So, I put togheter some people with the theme. Unfortunately the person who had the idea, RC, to write a theme based on OS X left the project, because lost the interest actually (and I know why), so I'm the only maintainer, developer and active author of the theme.

I used, and tolerated, window maker with GNUstep for years. WMaker occupies a lot of my laptop screen with its giant icons everywhere, I don't like it so much, so I started to write a new window manager, GNUstep optimized, using GNUstep and Objective-C. The tdevelopment will be not fast, because I had no knowledge about X11 and windowing system in general, so I had to study how X11 works, and there are so many API and standard to support with X, that working in my free time, make the development slow. I asked for help, I received support from Fred, where we also spoken about Wayland, where I offered my support as I can. Fred supported me, but I expected support from other and more people, I know they "played" with X11 more then me; for e.g a little help on supporting EWMH/ICCM will be very nice (or I have to do it alone reading tons of docs and code from others WMs). But then I read many people on the mailing list that want a Window Manger written in Objective-C and GNUstep, it's a bit frustrating... but I'm not here to do flame or similar things, maybe they don't like my project.

@Riccardo, @Adam:

Riccardo, fortunately GNUstep supports 3 different styles for the Menus, I think I expressed bad my problem. The Menus appears when I click on the relative App's window, so they are working as expected; but if I have 10 windows on the screen, organized to fill all the screen, as a tiled window manager does, when I will click on an App's window, the relative menu have to appear somewhere, but the screen is filled so it will overlaps a window of another App that I probably need to read, so I have to move the menu to another position. This also would happen on a NeXTSTEP system, because is how they designed the architecture of their DE. I'm sorry, but I don't like at all this design, it's also something about tastes, but it is also something about "functionality" if you also think about the Apps' icons; but I repeat, fortunately GNUstep supports 3 different menu styles, and reading the Richard slides is also possible to write an own one. Think that on my laptop, 3 windows are sufficient to fill all the screen, add the menus and the relative App's icons on the right of the screen and the dock, using NeXT style and wmaker.

@Adam,
As I said, I tried to put togheter the people, without so much success, maybe because I'm young to the project, maybe because someone think I'm just saying stupid and useless things, maybe because I never committed code directly to the GNUstep svn, I just wrote a theme that each time is seen the reaction is "WoW" for GNUstep, it needs to be polished, it will be. I started a thread about NSCollectionView, and in that thread 1 of the most common GNUstep problem (about 8 years problem) was solved. In that thread Fred solved, coding, a problem with Cocoa NSCollectionView compatibility, and I helped with testing on both platforms, Cocoa and GNUStep. Now you can write an application on Cocoa using NSCollectionView (and bindings) and then port it to GNUstep doing very few changes to the code. Then another problem comes out, and it is a bit heavy, with just 31 subelements, they will overlaps. This is much probably a -back problem related to cairo/X11 (I should investigate to be more precise). In this period of vacation I'm thinking to work on this bad problem, but I'll need help and I hope to obtain help.

The rik theme is not quite polished, but it works well or at least not so bad; GNUstep actually needs more love than my theme, and this is a fact.
Why I say this? Because if you want to build an OS using GNUstep you have to know that you will need to work on GNUstep, as Riccardo and David have said about incompleteness, and with this point I agree with them. But I'm happy with this project, piStep or piOs whatever is the name, because it could be useful to the GNUstep-core code. I hope GNUstep will receive back code, patches and implementations of new code where needed.

@Adam, If you want to help me you are welcome too.

Sooner or later I will offer my support again to Fred with Wayland, I just hope to finish to read the freedesktop standard (EWMH and ICCCM)

Il 29/11/2015 23:01, Adam S ha scritto:

Guys,

These ideas are great but you need to "act". If you feel strongly about a theme, application or whatever then get out there, find other interested people and put a team together.

Put this energy into doing instead of describing.

Adam.

On Nov 29, 2015 9:51 PM, "Riccardo Mottola" <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:

Hi,


Gregory Casamento wrote:

I would very much like to see our interface changed to something
everyone can be in love with.   This is only good for the project.
Our out of the box experience with users SUCKS ROCKS and this is
something we need to think about.

I agree on that statement! the problem is that the whole thread here shows that nobody here agrees with the other one on how to improve it. Some say look, some say application, some say configuration tools, some want this, that, whatever.

Thus, well, for sure we can improve our applications, our preferences and our theming capabilities and support so that we can make more people happy. And also a way to set these as a default.

And, to be honest, I am working extremely hard on this night and day in the past years and other like Richard and Fred helped mightly on the core side.

I have never liked Jesse's theme. You do. The only solution is that you can run it easily and without issues.
Somebody wants the Tango theme? Activating it shall be one click.
Gael or Adam want a clean classic theme? Fine too... and we all know that even our default theme is lacking.
For Gnome-like theme it will be never as perfect, but it shouldn't be hard either.

Everybody wants improved and more applications.

After all, the experience is the sum of all that: "applications" which have a "feel" and have a "look". The experience is a sum of all that. Since we lack a bit on everything, but especially on the application and smoothness side, the rest becomes more evident too.

Riccardo

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I not quoted all emails I answered to be more concise.

Alex.