> GNUstep has lacked and continues to lack good PR, consistent development of > applications. But for the core itself I think the following points would > help us a lot (in no particular order)
I think the design Website is - in its current state - a bit outdated: It still appeals to the NeXT era kind of look and feel, but now the most exciting stuff seems to be going on in OS X. Also navigating the website, it could use more simplicity and structure. The following sites have excellent design: http://cocoadevcentral.com/ (try one of the tutorials) http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/11/creating-iphone-and-mac-icons-using.html and - last but not least the apple website. But more important the Top most two reasons which prevent me from using GNUstep for more than hobby hacking are those: *. Look and feel. Althought Qt is an excellent development environment, I ditched it together with KDE, because it is so cluttered and grossly inconsistent in its look and feel. Icons play an extremely important role there, and the KDE icons look childish. But consistency plays the most important role in look at feel. Here, the default GNUstep theme, though outdated, is pretty good. The master in this category here is OS X, but I dumped it for the following reaon. *. Usability: Having a fast, simple way of doing everyday work. For me, keyboard support is the most important, since my day job is that of a software developer. This is why I dumped OS X and ended up installing Debian on my $4000k Mac in the past: The weird keyboard layout, mostly missing keyboard shortcuts for even the essential things (like maximizing / minimizing windows), no keyboard configurability made OS X a nice toy, but nothing serious I could use for day-to-day work. It seems to have improved since 10.3, but for today I am put off by Apples restrictive licensing, and the fact that I was forced to spend EUR 150 for a new OS version, just to be able to run Java 1.5. GNOME is the desktop of choice for me ATM, because it has modern look and feel, is very consistent, and has a keyboard way of doing things (like incremental search in the Alt-F2-Dialog and lists, TAB-completion in the File Dialog, configurable Keyboard shortcuts, being able to use the cursor arrows for GUI element focus navigation), without enforcing it on the user. Look and feel as well as keyboard usability are my main issues with GNUstep ATM. Hopefully with the Gtk+-Theme I am developing ATM, this will be fixed soon (If I have time). Interestingly, since the Gtk+-Theme goes much deeper than alternate pixmaps, it shows how GSTheme could be extended in the future (especially where I have to use Categories to override widget drawing functions). Apart from that, one thing about GNUstep annoys me very much: The absence of context menus. I don't know currently how OS X handles that, but often I would find myself right-clicking on something, but the application menu pops up. Lastly about the GNUstep community: My main problem when I started contributing (writing pbxbuild in two weeks of vacation), was that I did get no feedback. I therefore felt that no one really was using it / or cared about it and that extinguished my motivation at that point and my interest therefore changed to other things. The GNUstep community, tough, is pretty friendly and tolerant to mistakes, and today I still remember Fred Kiefers kind reactions when I messed up things in the cairo backend or broke something in GNUstep gui. I spent most of the my open source time in Ardour during the last two years. It has a very lively community (especially in IRC). There are lots of users coming in on IRC giving lots of feedback. That kept me motivated for a long time. (But I currently don't use it much...) Lastly about funding: I was very glad to read the news from the Linux Fund, and since I also watched the project since 1996, I am glad someone pays attention to it that way. I didn't quite understand whether the $1000-$5000 figure was per month or one-time sums from the mails, and I will be glad to see it used to help GNUstep advance. Cheers to the linux fund for that. Kind regards, Hans Baier _______________________________________________ Gnustep-dev mailing list Gnustep-dev@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev
