Re: Comments on the website from people on twitter...

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi William,

your wants are far more than just some medium-term GNUstep goals. Your  
desires need a good support of Operating System to. Your desires express,  
at the end, stopping to be dependent of current proprietary applications  
and operating systems because they stopped existence or they went into a  
direction of development. You are, I think, touching the heart of  
existence of Open Source.

I think that we seek common goals and goals apparently shared with others,  
but often not told because developers speak up most often. A working  
"environment" of your taste, which works reliably and supports features  
you need. Everybody wants then his own set of applications and has  
different hardware necessities.

> I want a replacement for Macromedia Freehand / Altsys Virtuoso which  
> doesn't leave me beholden to Adobe. That's a PostScript-oriented  
> vector-drawing program w/ an elegant interface. Bonus if it supports  
> creating vector brushes like Creaturehouse Expression. Even better if  
> it'd support METAPOST and allow one to switch between drawing and coding.

The only think going into that direction is Graphos which will probably  
never fully support your needs, you need a new more advanced project or  
perhaps a fork or port of some other existing application.
However, Graphos may still prove useful for developing and testing stuff  
you need to support, read further below.


> I want a replacement for Lotus Improv which has undo and the nice 3D  
> graphs from Informix WingZ.
We have Flexisheet in GAP. It needs to be improved, debugged, completed.  
Only little has been done, except getting it open, imported and "cleaned  
enough to compile and start".

> I want Services to work _everywhere_ and to be able to display a .pdf  
> (or .eps) and be confident it'll print (I guess Display GhostScript is  
> gone? I find that aspect of the project confusing).
Display post-script is gone as a backend, its integration with X11 was  
never good, other may have more details on that, but printing should print  
exactly the way you see it, as on Mac.

Right thanks to Graphos, there has been quite some improvement done on  
this sector, but there is still a lot to do regarding margins and  
pagination.

GSPdf is GNUstep's front-end to ghostscript, so it will display PS files,  
essentially like gv but with a nice interface. If you install it, you can  
use it to view easily the PS files generated from our backend.
Draw something in graphos, print, see and put the windows side-by-side.  
Except margins I see that  colors, paths, shapes and text get printed as I  
expect them.

> I need to assemble a system which works on a portable machine w/ a Wacom  
> digitizer (supporting pressure input would be nice) and  
> daylight-viewable display which can replace my current system (a Fujitsu  
> Stylistic ST-4121 running Windows XP Tablet PC edition, Autodesk  
> Sketchbook, FutureWave SmartSketch, Macromedia FreeHand, WinTeXshell,  
> EverNote, Lotus Improv, &c.).

This needs support for the hardware you need on the operating system, as a  
first thing. Afterwards all your nice apps you want on top of it.

I want about the same on other notebooks, so not to depend on Apple, my  
Workspace so not to have to endure the absurd Metro interface or 10.8 (and  
who knows next what comes in its iPhonization).
I need more photographic oriented tools, a reliable email client, the  
standard tools of a "desktop" (finder, terminal, preferences and  
configuration), stuff like FTP. As you may know I work on many of them,  
thus I too need better development tools.
All this is of course a long, long road!

Tablet support on free OSs is at least spotty and also quite hard to  
configure sometimes.

To test the Graphos interface with a my Tablet, I run windows and an X  
server on windows and export display to it, because that way support is  
much better and consistent ;) On Gentoo it works quite well for me -  
except pressure support, which no GS app would support anyway currently, I  
used GIMP as a test.

Riccardo