On Saturday 04 March 2006 09:33, Sašo Kiselkov wrote: > And not only that, I think the separators are a style element which set us > appart from the plain Apple style, and we need to be different so our menu > system won't be an obvious rip-off.
I really like the Apple style menu on top of the screen. I think for most people used to Windows or MacOSX (or KDE and GNOME) the Apple style menu is more useable then the the vertical Nextstep menus. But I have to admit that I really don't like these vertical seperators. They just make the menu look more busy and less elegant. I don't know anybody who does not understand the concept of a menu. I think it really doesn't make any sense to introduce style elements which sets the Etoile menus apart from the plain Apple style if this does only make the menu look more busy and less elegant. The Amiga did have an Apple style menu on top of the screen (see http://toastytech.com/guis/amigaaweb.gif) and also KDE can use the Apple style menu on top of the screen (see http://people.kde.nl/images/boud/desktop_big.png) and they both did not introduce new style elements because it is not necessary and (at least in my opinion) just makes the menu look worse. Basically, just doing things different from Windows/MacOSX/KDE/Gnome for the sake of being different is one of the main problems I have with gnustep/Etoile. Many things in Windows/MacOSX/KDE/Gnome might not be perfect, but they work reasonably well for many people and people can get their work done with it. With gnustep/Etoile this is not possible at the moment. For me, the first step for gnustep/Etoile should be to create a framework and applications so that peope could actually use gnustepEtoile. For this it is perfectly fine (at least for me) to just use some ideas from Windows/MacOSX/KDE/Gnome that work reasonably well. Then people should start to implement new ideas and improve gnustep/Etoile. I am one of the contributors of Krita (a KDE painting/image editing application). I thought a number of times about creating a simple pixel painting application like Kolourpaint/MS paint for gnustep. I suppose coding such an application shouldn't even be that hard. I have gnustep installed on my computer and I guess I also have the coding skills to write an application like this. But my problem is, that I cannot use gnustep. Basically all the esential applications like a webbrowser are missing, KDE/Gnome applications look totally foreign in wmaker + gnustep and gnustep applications are hardly useable in KDE. And I also don't like to write an application if noone at all will use it and I don't know anybody at all that uses gnustep right now. I think the gnustep/Etoile people should create a lightweight MacOSX like desktop environement (maybe something similar like XFCE) and some of the most important applications like a browser, an email program (probably GNUMail is fine), a good editor (personally I would like to see something like kate, but maybe not as bloated). I think it is perfectly fine to look at Windows/MacOSX/KDE/Gnome and copy the best ideas from them. MS, Apple, KDE and Gnome all copied the best ideas from eachother and from other systems and there is really nothing wrong with that. We all learn from other people. After this is done and gnustep/Etoile gets a reasonable number of users/developers, one could start to think about improving gnustep/Etoile over existing systems like Windows/MacOSX/KDE/Gnome. But in my opinion, one should really take one step after another and not try to make everything different from the very beginning. This almost never works out. I am quite sure if I would have a useable desktop based on gnustep TODAY that I can actually use to surf the web, write emails and so on, I would have already started to develop for gnustep/Etoile. But I will never start to develop for gnustep/Etoile if gnustep/Etoile is just about being different from Windows/MacOSX/KDE/Gnome. And I am not the only one that thinks like that. There recently was an interview with the main developer of Krita (http://people.kde.nl/boud.html). He talks a bit why he is developing for KDE and not the competition and he says: What competition? When I started looking for something better than fvwm, GNUStep was still in denial mode -- we're not a desktop environment, we're a cross platform development platform! -- and little-known GREAT was a gratis but closed source CDE clone. CDE was out of reach, so I started using KDE as soon as I got my first computer with 64MB of memory. And when I wanted to code a GUI application for Linux, the only GUI toolkit that came close to being as easy to use as Visual Basic was Qt with its Python bindings. Motif was closed, Gtk still asked me to handle the scrollbars around a treeview myself, that funny toolkit Lyx used -- XForms -- was closed, binary and sucked. And Athena simply demanded C coding. No way... So my second free software application, Kura was done in PyQt. (The first was a UUCP mail and news client in Visual Basic -- just when I had finished it, I moved to Linux.) And when I got my first glimmer of Gnome it was a horrible, complex, convoluted, crash-prone sliver of a shell around Enlightenment. I remember I called it the Dark Side of User Interface Design in an article I wrote for O'Reilly Network. That kind of political incorrectness would be impossible nowadays, of course, so I won't repeat that remark. And the current state of the competition doesn't inspire a desire to switch either. XFCE isn't competition: it may have a panel and a file manager, but there's no framework for integrating applications. GNUStep applications are still horribly crash prone and there's still no concerted effort making a real GNUStep desktop environment. And Gnome still looks like no fun at all to hack on. Or work with. Krita is becoming really nice lately. Just imagine he would have started to work on a gnustep image editing application instead of an KDE image editing application. I am not writing this because I want to blame gnustep/Etoile developers. I write this because I think it is a really pity that gnustep/Etoile keeps a shadowy existence. I think gnustep could have been THE desktop environement for Linux/BDS/... if it would have actually tried to. Greetings, Michael _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
