On 4/4/07, Isaiah Beerbower <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
If you read my email correctly (or maybe I was confusing?) you would see that I was saying services should be application like. I know that all services are currently applications, my suggestion was to create our own "NSApplication" class so as to give the services a standard behavior. My idea had nothing to do with making services into bundles, quite the contrary!
Yes, but I was just pointing that's more or less what's already planned. Currently we have applications that provides services -- in the gnustep sense : eg they provide a way of doing something with the current pasteboard selection. It's useful, but we need more: we need a way to basically expose "services" that would be programmatically accessible too. Eg, we need a kind of registry where applications can describe which methods you can call, etc. It's actually the "role" idea we talked about extensively. It's not even hard to do, and we'll likely use CoreObject as our "registry".
> Now, that does NOT mean that our "applications" will behave as > isolated as current desktop applications do -- to the contrary ! and > they will likely not be really similar to "current applications". But > I don't see why technically we should get rid of them. Our services will be document based, will they not? Almost everything you do on the computer writes to or reads from a document; why not treat it that way?
I see services more as actions and/or filters than "documents"...
> Basically what you are proposing is awfully close to the architecture > we already have :) > > (and yes, services are described already in a plist, etc ;-) I didn't say they didn't! (deep breath) I suggested adding a NEW plist file describing what settings a service has and how they should be edited. All settings could then be changed by opening the settings document with a preferences editor. The preferences editor would look for a settings plist in the service which would tell it how to edit the settings in the user's settings file (i.e. in ~/GNUstep/Defaults, or wherever they are, I forget).
I'm not really convainced by "generated" preferences panels -- sure it saves time, but a generated UI is always worse than what you'd have by a manually done UI. And using Gorm, a manually constructed doesn't take much. Add bindings and it would be nearly as fast to do ;-) (ok, gnustep doesn't have bindings yet, but perhaps after the GSoc)
> I'm not sure about the "let's get rid of prefrences panels" -- it > seems to me more an etymologic change (let's call them preferences > documents!) than a real technical change. I'm not just changing the name! I'm actually treating the preferences like other documents!
why ? and more importantly, what'll be the differences ?
> On adding more "pickers" it's a good idea. Not sure about a calculator > one, but a date/time picker would be neat, yes. Other "pickers" idea ? A character picker would be nice. A language picker could also be nice. The calculator idea is to replace a *normal* desktop calculator, and put it in a floating window, where it belongs. It could be seen as a "number picker".
I'm not sure why a calculator would be better as a "picker" than as a separate "application". Note too that with the "roles" concept you could easily use/exchange "components" (applications) as long as they provide said role.
Please reply, Isaiah Beerbower > (ps: I didn't answer to david's mail -- but basically I entirely agree > with him, files are bad. The only problem I have is how long will it > takes us to do it, and what should we do in the meantime) NOTE: That's not just David. That is a discussion between several people from the chat room. If you haven't read the actual discussion (and I'm not saying that its bad if you haven't) it might be the cause of you misunderstanding my email. The ideas here were additions to what was discussed there.
I read the discussion, and never said it was only david's idea :) -- it's an idea we even discussed before quite a few time on this mailing list and/or in real life with david and quentin and others... ;-) As I said, I'm convainced by it's usefulness -- after all am I not a Smalltalk zealot ? -- but I'd just like us to discuss what we should do in the short term. -- Nicolas Roard "La perfection, ce n'est pas quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, c'est quand il n'y a plus rien à enlever." -- Antoine de St-Exupéry _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list Etoile-discuss@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
