Re: Away for a week

[Stefan Urbanek]

Hello fred,

First, thank you for your fixes.

My suggested priorities would be: 3., 6. and last 4.

I would put Windows backed higher priority for several reasons:
1. There is (latent) demand for GNUstep applications working on windows
2. There is no alternative for GNUstep on windows
(3. People are not going to switch any time soon to some normal OS)

The first point can be seen as a bit selfish from my point of view, but even if 
the point is not so big true now, it will be soon or later. For example, the 
AgentFarms project, where lots of potential users are using windows and are not 
computer experts, they are usualy experts in their own field with computer 
knowledge on user level. Besides that, gnustep has big, not-yet-used potential 
to offer powerful applications for such kind of people. (It is easier to create 
user oriented application in gnustep than in any other development 
environment). Not mentioning Gorm or not-yet-written Class Editor :-)

I've seen GNUstep-base-install.exe or something like that. It would be great if 
there was something like GNUstep-environment-install.exe. GNUstep can be 
treated on windows as kind of self-sufficient and self-contained environment 
(think of Mozilla).

I think, GNUstep can offer something innovative to Windows, so it is no waste 
of time, as some people think. Windows user base is still large, so why ignore 
it? There is nothing to lose, only to gain: users and testers. I am sure it 
there was working GNUstep on windows it will be used.

If you consider working on Windows,  I can be a tester - AgentFarms uses lots 
(almost all) of GNUstep strong features (DO, ObjectiveC runtime handling, 
distributed notifications, external task execution, threads,...)

What do you think?

Have a nice week,

Stefan Urbanek

On 2003-08-20 23:13:22 +0200 Fred Kiefer <address@hidden> wrote:

> I will be away for a few days, but am already thinking about what to do after 
> my return. In the last weeks I did mostly follow the complains on the mailing 
> list and tried to fix what was on the top of the list, a rather frustrating way 
> of programming. I want to get back to a mode, where the task at hand is a bit 
> more planed.
>
> There are different areas, where I have half thought up extensions for GNUstep. 
> I will list some of them in this mail to get your comments while I am away:
>
> 1. Support for image colours. This feature would make most of the current 
> themes support obsolete, as much of it would be obtainable by colour lists. The 
> big missing part is the setting and drawing of image colours in the back end. 
> To implement this we could use simple image tileing, similar to what is used in 
> the themes bundle.
>
> 2. Better interaction with different windows manager. This is a bit harder, as 
> it has loads of different aspects. First there is [NSScreen visibleFrame] and 
> the use of it. Second the window borders. Third there is all the stuff from 
> freedesktop.org.
>
> 3. I did promise some work on the Windows backend. Is there really anybody 
> interested in that?
>
> 4. Clean up of the text system.
>
> 5. The old boring cleanup and bug fixes on GUI.
>
> 6. There is also the idea that I did write a few months ago in a mail to 
> Richard, that we should use gdomap to implement more of the GUI general 
> interaction methods (like hideOtherApplications:) by exporting the list of the 
> running GNUstep applications with an interface similar to what gets used for 
> the donames() function. This would be used by the GSServiceManager to provide 
> some methods for NSApplication and NSWorkspace.
>
> This is a lot more than I am able do for the rest of this year, so please give 
> me your priorities.
>
> Fred
>
>
>
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