On 16/12/2006, at 5:10, Gregory John Casamento wrote:
1)
Adopt a more modern look.
I like the original GUI as it has a sober and calm look and I
wouldn't mind a new GUI, but there are a lot of imperfections
especially in shoddy text placement that makes it look unfinished.
It's quite easy to tell the difference between GNUstep and NeXTStep
screenshots, just by looking at how carefully text and elements are
arranged.
Would it not be a good idea to embrace a scheme that says that you
keep going with refining a specific feature until it's perfect,
before moving on to the next, so it doesn't come back and bite you in
the behind later?
7) Make GNUstep friendly
with other environments like GNOME, KDE, Windows and etc. Make sure
that GNUstep functions sanely in these environments. This might mean
that we need to have behaviors for each different environment. How to
implement this is unclear, but it's something that I believe would
make
the user experience better overall.
I've been observing GNUstep for some time now and if there's
something that I see open source projects suffer from, it's a lack of
focus and trying to do too much at the same time. GNUstep is no
different in this matter and I think also that is why it has not come
any further than it has.
Spending time making GNUstep working with Gnome and KDE and all the
other desktop environments gives absolutely no advantage to GNUstep
at all at this time. It would make sense if GNUstep had a killer
office package that Gnome, KDE or Windows users really want to run,
but the amount of killer apps are rather limited at this time.
Doing this now will show everyone that GNUstep is just trying to play
catch up and that the developers are spending their time to make
TalkSoup look somewhat integrated into someone else's desktop
environment. Is there a future in that? Would developers then start
developing for GNUstep? I don't think so.
I think it would be much better to focus now on getting a decent
desktop environment out of GNUstep powered programs alone. Make a
desktop environment that runs flawlessly off an installable live CD,
one that shows that GNUstep can give life to a PC all on its own
without the help of KDE, Gnome or whatever.
It should be a live CD that would allow a user to be productive and
creative and would impress other people than just a few objective C
developers.
When that happens, people will see that it's a system that can be
worth learning to develop for and you will get much more notice than
doing the other thing. You will stand out of the crowd.
The current live CD is the right direction, but it needs a lot more
work.
I now ask these questions: What was the original goal of NeXT with
their OS? Should that goal not also be the same for GNUstep?
--
Regards,
Henrik Mikael Kristensen
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