Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37
On Saturday 26 November 2005 12:57, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My idea of a good desktop follows along the nextstep design and thats it. Did Steve Jobs intend nextstep to be a good citizen of other desktops? I dont think so. I dont know about openstep but it seems that its not a good citizen of other desktops too. Maybe thats why next was never able to make a sustainable business on it. The problem with this is, that gnustep is not useable as a desktop at all right now. For instance, there is no browser, so you have to use Firefox or Konqueror or any other browser of your choice and gnustep apps and KDE/GNOME apps just don't work very well together because of issues like horizontal menu bar vs. vertical menubar. Furthermore, under KDE gnustep is basically not usable at all. The gnustep menu doesn't work correctly. I don't know if this is a kwin bug or a gnustep bug. And nextstep/openstep is dead for a long time. Without Steve Jobs noone would care for nextstp/openstep at all anymore. Steve Jobs did the right thing. He turned nextstep into something the average Joe user can and wants to use. Steve Jobs allways managed to make things that excite people. But gnustep is not exciting for the average Joe user. It is an excellent development framework based on an excellent language, but there are absolutely no applications which make it worth using gnustep, it looks ugly compared to MacOSX, KDE or GNOME (this is of course personal preference but I am quite sure if you ask 100 average computer users which look they like most, gnustep will be the loser by a wide margin), it interoperates badly with every other free desktop environement (which is bad because there are essential apps like a browser missing in gnustep) and it is hard to install. I wish there would be someone like Steve Jobs who could make gnustep more popular. It is such a nice framework based on a really nice language. But without a bigger community, gnustep will never gain enough momentum. And without some radical changes in look and feel and interoperability this will not happen. Greetings, Michael ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 2005-11-26 21:25:16 +0800 Michael Thaler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And nextstep/openstep is dead for a long time. Without Steve Jobs noone would care for nextstp/openstep at all anymore. Steve Jobs did the right thing. He turned nextstep into something the average Joe user can and wants to use. Steve Jobs allways managed to make things that excite people. But gnustep is not exciting for the average Joe user. It is an excellent development framework based on an excellent language, but there are absolutely no applications which make it worth using gnustep, it looks ugly compared to MacOSX, KDE or GNOME (this is of course personal preference but I am quite sure if you ask 100 average computer users which look they like most, gnustep will be the loser by a wide margin), it interoperates badly with every other free desktop environement (which is bad because there are essential apps like a browser missing in gnustep) and it is hard to install. Not really. Mac OS X is openstep. Its very much alive. In fact I started to get interested in GNUstep when i dug a little bit into Mac OS X documentation. It showed that the design is sound and commercially viable. The core developers of GNUstep want a portable cross platform development environment. They just dont care if its popular or not. They have something they can use and if the rest of the world thinks otherwise then, well, so what? GNUstep is not going to go away. Im using an almost all GNUstep laptop. I built it by hand from sources but of course its not complete. Its running on debian and the browser is firefox. Its not wise to start hyping gnustep before we have something like a nextstep reincarnation. Thats just my opinion anyway. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using the GPG bundle for GNUMail iD8DBQFDiHQZyihxuQOYt8wRApgYAKC4pD3GkPxItKcMquOaDGfpudCYQwCfcYYu zTUjJ3N52ldtkWNvjzSlebw= =8HtH -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37
On 26 Nov 2005, at 13:25, Michael Thaler wrote: On Saturday 26 November 2005 12:57, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My idea of a good desktop follows along the nextstep design and thats it. Did Steve Jobs intend nextstep to be a good citizen of other desktops? I dont think so. I dont know about openstep but it seems that its not a good citizen of other desktops too. Maybe thats why next was never able to make a sustainable business on it. The problem with this is, that gnustep is not useable as a desktop at all right now. For instance, there is no browser, so you have to use Firefox or Konqueror or any other browser of your choice Yep ... I use firefox within a GNUstep desktop and I find it annoyingly clunky/awkward in comparison with the 'native' applications. Perhaps we should try getting in on firefox development with the aim of getting it to play nicely with GNUstep? Seamless integration is probably an unreasonable target, but perhaps we could get an option for its menu system to work like a GNUstep app? and gnustep apps and KDE/GNOME apps just don't work very well together because of issues like horizontal menu bar vs. vertical menubar. Furthermore, under KDE gnustep is basically not usable at all. The gnustep menu doesn't work correctly. I don't know if this is a kwin bug or a gnustep bug. Any KDE users want to fix this? And nextstep/openstep is dead for a long time. Without Steve Jobs noone would care for nextstp/openstep at all anymore. Steve Jobs did the right thing. He turned nextstep into something the average Joe user can and wants to use. Steve Jobs allways managed to make things that excite people. But gnustep is not exciting for the average Joe user. It is an excellent development framework based on an excellent language, but there are absolutely no applications which make it worth using gnustep, it looks ugly compared to MacOSX, KDE or GNOME (this is of course personal preference but I am quite sure if you ask 100 average computer users which look they like most, gnustep will be the loser by a wide margin), True if you show them it on a 14 display ... the gui was designed for 19 and more, and really is far and away better than any of the others on a 21 ... one of the reasons I want better theme support in the gui is so that we can have a modified look/feel that works well for small displays. Personally, I think the GNUstep gui is still a winner down to 17, but below that MacOS-X definitely seems to work best. it interoperates badly with every other free desktop environement (which is bad because there are essential apps like a browser missing in gnustep) and it is hard to install. The last I'm unsure about ... whenever I've tried to build/install kde or gnome it's been a hell of a mess, and I've only ever had a smooth time of it when depending on some distribution to have packaged it so I don't have to do it myself. I strongly suspect that gnustep is actually comparatively easy to install. However, we are coming from behind in the race ... it's not good enough to be the easiest to build/install if the alternatives (and everything they depend upon) come pre-installed as part of the distribution. I wish there would be someone like Steve Jobs who could make gnustep more popular. It is such a nice framework based on a really nice language. But without a bigger community, gnustep will never gain enough momentum. And without some radical changes in look and feel and interoperability this will not happen. Since I think we have easily the best look and feel on large/modern displays, obviously changing the look/feel would be a BAD idea on those systems. However, the rest I agree with ... we need themes for alternatives on smaller displays and to give us the option of fitting into essentially non-gnustep environments. As a happy byproduct of such themability people who simply don't like the GNUstep look/feel would be able to adopt others irrespective of the actual merits in terms of usability. It would also be nice to improve select non-gnustep applications (firefox my favorite) to work better in a GNustep environment. Another thing I'd like to see is thought on how to integrate better into non-gnustep environments, as this seems a fairly obvious first stage to getting people to look at GNUstep. For instance, app icons are a big advantage of GNUstep ... you can use drag and drop to put things on them ... eg have the app open documents dropped on it. you can have the app icon display application status information etc. We could have a dock application to hold app icons where the window manager doesn't use them, retaining the enhanced functionality they provide for GNUstep apps, but managing the icons so they don't look so out of place on a system not designed to work with them. ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing
Re: Clash of the Titans, GNUstep alongside GNOME
On 26 Nov 2005, at 15:27, Nicolas Roard wrote: On 11/26/05, Rogelio M. Serrano Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 2005-11-26 14:22:25 +0800 Thom Cherryhomes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: it is worth noting that YES, a colour change would go part of the way to avoid the clash, but it doesn't solve some of the (1) the BIG APPICON THAT DOESN'T FIT ANYWHERE Of course its not intended to live in a taskbar nor is it aware of taskbars. Its meant to be big so you see it. a lot of small icons in taskbar can become confusing. Same as the windows taskbar with 20 small icons. I just cant find what im looking for. The point is, it's perfectly fine if you're running WindowMaker, but it should disappear in *any* other situation / window managers / desktop For example, I'm using a gnustep desktop, but at the moment I use Metacity + GWorkspace + GWorkspace shelf. Damn, huge stupid icons clashing with my OPENSTEP 4 setup.. :-) Of course that's the same problem if you want to run a GNUstep app (say, GNUMail) within KDE or GNOME. Basically, the appicon should disappear with other windowmanagers. I think you should have the OPTION of having the app icon disappear (actually, I thought you already did ... but perhaps it's gone or doesn't work reliably). I don't believe it should do it by default ... the icon is too useful for that. I also think it would be nice to have an app which would manage appicons (sort of like a dock ... a panel containing the appicons of all running gnustep apps and allowing you to organize/manage them when running in a gnustep-hostile window manager). I don't know if you have used the windows backend recently, but it now pops up an alert panel the first time you use an app, which asks whether you want to use GNUstep/NeXTstep style window borders and appicons or native window borders and the taskbar. This then sets user defaults accordingly (and doesn't ask again unless you remove the user defaults). It also inserts something in the standard info panel to let you call up this option again if you change your mind. To my mind, this is a thoroughly good thing ... and should probably be done by the X backends too. It keeps the standard default look and feel. It lets you easily change to work with the 'native' environment it doesn't keep intruding once you have set things up It's easy to change your mind later - first, people trying GNUstep apps will likely do it first in their usual environment; if GNUstep apps play well with it, it can be an incentive for them to really try a GNUstep desktop (if they don't play well, it'll be more hm, not really interesting, move on, nothing to see) - second, even you are probably running other X11 apps (mozilla, firefox.. ?) within your GNUstep desktop; better integration will help.. and if we provide *good* apps (imho what we should try to harvest, that's another thing that bring users ;-) it's likely that a sizeable fraction of people will want to run them alongside their normal desktop, and won't want to switch completely to WindowMaker -- eg just for run GNUMail, even if GNUMail is excellent... and more GNUstep apps used overall will improve our situation, even if they aren't run within a gnustep desktop - third, we *NEED* the integration anyway, because I don't think you can actually achieve anything on GNUstep/Windows if those integration problems aren't fixed -- it will be difficult to convaince all Windows users to switch to a GNUstep desktop, don't you think ? And fixing those on Windows (ie providing the right options / hooks) will help (or will solve) the possible integration problems with KDE/GNOME. Yes ... but I suspect people are worried and overreact to the suggestions of changing things ... of course we DON'T want to change things to remove all that's good about the NEXT designed GUI, but that's what it often sounds like when people start complaining about lack of 'integration' with a 'native' interface. This is why I'm concerned that we should - 1. keep the current interface as default 2. provide themes for the other interfaces 3. make switching VERY easy 4. try to make things interoperate as well as possible even when we are not using themes to make things match. ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 2005-11-26 23:54:31 +0800 Richard Frith-Macdonald [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 26 Nov 2005, at 13:25, Michael Thaler wrote: Yep ... I use firefox within a GNUstep desktop and I find it annoyingly clunky/awkward in comparison with the 'native' applications. Perhaps we should try getting in on firefox development with the aim of getting it to play nicely with GNUstep? Seamless integration is probably an unreasonable target, but perhaps we could get an option for its menu system to work like a GNUstep app? Yes I agree. and gnustep apps and KDE/GNOME apps just don't work very well together because of issues like horizontal menu bar vs. vertical menubar. Furthermore, under KDE gnustep is basically not usable at all. The gnustep menu doesn't work correctly. I don't know if this is a kwin bug or a gnustep bug. Any KDE users want to fix this? yup this should befixed. True if you show them it on a 14 display ... the gui was designed for 19 and more, and really is far and away better than any of the others on a 21 ... one of the reasons I want better theme support in the gui is so that we can have a modified look/feel that works well for small displays. Personally, I think the GNUstep gui is still a winner down to 17, but below that MacOS-X definitely seems to work best. Again yes i agree. I have to get a 19 inch soon. The last I'm unsure about ... whenever I've tried to build/install kde or gnome it's been a hell of a mess, and I've only ever had a smooth time of it Been there... done that. Im not going back to see if got better. The installation issue is really not gnusteps fault. Somebody just needs to engineer the installation. but hey we are not there yet. I like the openstep idea though and i think im going to take a deep breathe calm down and take a pause from my pursuit of a pure nextstep clone. If we look at a little history... nextstep came first. then they stripped it out and it became openstep. openstep is portable to other platforms and architectures. then came webobjects. This makes me realize that nextstep can be made out of openstep and the portablility of the apps can be a benefit to the nextstep clone. wait, did this happen already? I wish there would be someone like Steve Jobs who could make gnustep more popular. It is such a nice framework based on a really nice language. But without a bigger community, gnustep will never gain enough momentum. And without some radical changes in look and feel and interoperability this will not happen. Since I think we have easily the best look and feel on large/modern displays, obviously changing the look/feel would be a BAD idea on those systems. However, the rest I agree with ... we need themes for alternatives on smaller displays and to give us the option of fitting into essentially non-gnustep environments. As a happy byproduct of such themability people who simply don't like the GNUstep look/feel would be able to adopt others irrespective of the actual merits in terms of usability. It would also be nice to improve select non-gnustep applications (firefox my favorite) to work better in a GNustep environment. Yup. I think this is really very important. I dont care if we bend gnome to work with gnustep or make gnome look like gnustep. whichever is easier. we put the vertical scroll bar to the left and make the menu vertical. I think the gnustep community got it all covered. I can see theme projects, somebody is working on windows, some on a next clone, some on webobjects. is anybody doing multiarch/cross builds? Another thing I'd like to see is thought on how to integrate better into non-gnustep environments, as this seems a fairly obvious first stage to getting people to look at GNUstep. For instance, app icons are a big advantage of GNUstep ... you can use drag and drop to put things on them ... eg have the app open documents dropped on it. you can have the app icon display application status information etc. We could have a dock application to hold app icons where the window manager doesn't use them, retaining the enhanced functionality they provide for GNUstep apps, but managing the icons so they don't look so out of place on a system not designed to work with them. Its a political world... Yeah we should make gnustep become a good desktop citizen. more openstep apps the better. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using the GPG bundle for GNUMail iD8DBQFDiJaMyihxuQOYt8wRAvsHAJ9jwrDg7Mb+06xfvCqIq2+e//ba7ACff7kS zsI3hhy4uRf/7aAHxiEwVlo= =yIPp -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Clash of the Titans, GNUstep alongside GNOME
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 2005-11-27 00:34:58 +0800 Richard Frith-Macdonald [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 26 Nov 2005, at 15:27, Nicolas Roard wrote: On 11/26/05, Rogelio M. Serrano Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 2005-11-26 14:22:25 +0800 Thom Cherryhomes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: it is worth noting that YES, a colour change would go part of the way to avoid the clash, but it doesn't solve some of the (1) the BIG APPICON THAT DOESN'T FIT ANYWHERE Of course its not intended to live in a taskbar nor is it aware of taskbars. Its meant to be big so you see it. a lot of small icons in taskbar can become confusing. Same as the windows taskbar with 20 small icons. I just cant find what im looking for. The point is, it's perfectly fine if you're running WindowMaker, but it should disappear in *any* other situation / window managers / desktop For example, I'm using a gnustep desktop, but at the moment I use Metacity + GWorkspace + GWorkspace shelf. Damn, huge stupid icons clashing with my OPENSTEP 4 setup.. :-) I dont know how that looks like. I think at somepoint next was thinking of using a shelf. I like the next appicon style more though. Of course that's the same problem if you want to run a GNUstep app (say, GNUMail) within KDE or GNOME. Basically, the appicon should disappear with other windowmanagers. I think you should have the OPTION of having the app icon disappear (actually, I thought you already did ... but perhaps it's gone or doesn't work reliably). I don't believe it should do it by default ... the icon is too useful for that. I also think it would be nice to have an app which would manage appicons (sort of like a dock ... a panel containing the appicons of all running gnustep apps and allowing you to organize/manage them when running in a gnustep-hostile window manager). I don't know if you have used the windows backend recently, but it now pops up an alert panel the first time you use an app, which asks whether you want to use GNUstep/NeXTstep style window borders and appicons or native window borders and the taskbar. This then sets user defaults accordingly (and doesn't ask again unless you remove the user defaults). It also inserts something in the standard info panel to let you call up this option again if you change your mind. To my mind, this is a thoroughly good thing ... and should probably be done by the X backends too. It keeps the standard default look and feel. It lets you easily change to work with the 'native' environment it doesn't keep intruding once you have set things up It's easy to change your mind later - first, people trying GNUstep apps will likely do it first in their usual environment; if GNUstep apps play well with it, it can be an incentive for them to really try a GNUstep desktop (if they don't play well, it'll be more hm, not really interesting, move on, nothing to see) - second, even you are probably running other X11 apps (mozilla, firefox.. ?) within your GNUstep desktop; better integration will help.. and if we provide *good* apps (imho what we should try to harvest, that's another thing that bring users ;-) it's likely that a sizeable fraction of people will want to run them alongside their normal desktop, and won't want to switch completely to WindowMaker -- eg just for run GNUMail, even if GNUMail is excellent... and more GNUstep apps used overall will improve our situation, even if they aren't run within a gnustep desktop more i think about it... yeah i can agree thats a good thing. - third, we *NEED* the integration anyway, because I don't think you can actually achieve anything on GNUstep/Windows if those integration problems aren't fixed -- it will be difficult to convaince all Windows users to switch to a GNUstep desktop, don't you think ? And fixing those on Windows (ie providing the right options / hooks) will help (or will solve) the possible integration problems with KDE/GNOME. Yes ... but I suspect people are worried and overreact to the suggestions of changing things ... of course we DON'T want to change things to remove all that's good about the NEXT designed GUI, but that's what it often sounds like when people start complaining about lack of 'integration' with a 'native' interface. Yup thats why im wary of the portability thing. Native look is already too much portability. This is why I'm concerned that we should - 1. keep the current interface as default 2. provide themes for the other interfaces 3. make switching VERY easy 4. try to make things interoperate as well as possible even when we are not using themes to make things match. Portability just cant be ignored. I think i have to pause do a bit of backtracking. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using the GPG bundle for GNUMail
Re: Clash of the Titans, GNUstep alongside GNOME
On 26. Nov 2005, at 18:16 Uhr, Nicolas Roard wrote: - the feel -- more difficult; under windows you want menu-in- windows, etc Is it really such a big deal to resize the content-view of an NSWindow and place the menu at the top? (really, I have no idea, but this point sounds rather easy, no?) Greets, Helge -- http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/helge/ OpenGroupware.org ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: NSBrowser question
Quoting Andreas Höschler [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
Hello all,
I have done the following
[browser setMatrixClass:[FinderBrowserMatrix class]];
in order to implement dragging in a browser so I get a call to
- (void)mouseDown:(NSEvent *)event
on an instance of FinderBrowserMatrix. Any idea how I get back to the
browser in this method? Via superview I got to the ScrollView and
expected the documentView of the NSScrollView to be the browser (like I
set it up), but the documentview is an instance of FinderBrowserMatrix!?
No, it behaves correctly. Your problem is that NSBrowser creates a scroll view
for each of it's columns and puts an instance of your view's class inside such
a scroll view. Therefore, the right (though a bit dirty) way is the following:
@implementation NSView (FindingMyBrowserAdditions)
// finds the nearest enclosing browser view and returns it
- (NSBrowser *) enclosingBrowser
{
NSView * view;
for (view = [self superview]; view != nil; view = [view superview])
{
if ([view isKindOfClass: [NSBrowser class]])
{
break;
}
}
return (NSBrowser *) view;
}
@end
Thanks a lot!
Regards,
Andreas
You're welcome ;-)
--
Saso
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Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37
On Saturday 26 November 2005 16:54, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote: Since I think we have easily the best look and feel on large/modern displays, obviously changing the look/feel would be a BAD idea on those systems. However, the rest I agree with ... we need themes for Personally, I don't like the original nextstep/openstep look (I have a HP gecko with nextstep on it). I think it is dull and boring. And this has nothing todo with having a small display (mine is 17'' with 1280x1024 which is fine). think Plastik is a very nice theme, it is simplistic, but not totally boring. Have a look at: http://users.physik.tu-muenchen.de/mthaler/gnustep_plastik1.jpg http://users.physik.tu-muenchen.de/mthaler/gnustep_plastik2.jpg It is far from perfect, but I think Plastik looks also nice with gnustep and the gnustep applications now fit in quite well into my KDE desktop. However, the theme is not complete yet. I also do not like the gnustep icons too much. Have a look at http://www.oxygen-icons.org/?cat=3 This will be the default icon theme for KDE4. I think they look quite nice. Is it somehow possible to change the gnustep icons or create icon themes? Another thing I'd like to see is thought on how to integrate better into non-gnustep environments, as this seems a fairly obvious first stage to getting people to look at GNUstep. For instance, app icons That is my point. Right now gnustep is basically only interesting for ex-nextstep users and some other geeks. And that is a shame. Greetings, Michael ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Clash of the Titans, GNUstep alongside GNOME
First of all, a little criticism at the beginning: you are comparing two different things: GNUstep is a framework for developing applications, Gnome is a desktop environment. So next time compare either Gnome to, say, the Etoile project (www.etoile-project.org) or GNUstep to GTK 2.0. Quoting Thom Cherryhomes [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I have posted a screenshot of GNUstep apps running alongside GNOME applications I did this, because a picture is worth a thousand words as to the state of GNUstep's interoperability with other desktop environments http://64.74.186.169/gnustep_vs_gnome.png Nice shot ;-) I did this with GNUstep out of the box, no customisations, and put GWorkspace alongside the GNOME Nautilus file manager...why? because the file manager is what we use day in and day out to launch programs, launch documents, accomplish things... it is worth noting that YES, a colour change would go part of the way to avoid the clash, GNUstep is themeable, so you can easily switch to some other more fancy theme. but it doesn't solve some of the more glaring issues... particularly (1) the BIG APPICON THAT DOESN'T FIT ANYWHERE That's a matter of interface design. GNUstep follows the Apple/NeXT design which is app-centric, whereas Gnome follows Microsoft design which is window-centric. This roughly means: - In Apple/NeXT, the app is represented by a small graphical object (the app icon), and windows are more like scratch pads (documents) where you get your work done. It doesn't matter to you whether an app is running or not, you just use the documents it opens, when you're done, simply close them and not care about the small app icon. - In Microsoft, each single window corresponds to an instance of the app running. Open two Notepad windows, you have two running Notepad instances. Therefore, to get a consistent GNUstep environment, you *must* use some sort of dock-like app. Again on the other hand: I can't stand it when some non-NeXTish apps in my Window Maker environment simply don't show an app icon, but instead only when I miniaturize their window. Ugh - I hate that. (2) the BIG vertical menu that sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the horizontal menu bars Use the WildMenus bundle available from the GNUstep Applications Database (http://www.gnustep.org/GSWeb/GSApps.woa), section Workspace Dock to make your menus horizontal. However, it would be quite tough to get the main menu of an app into it's window (to look more Windowsish), due to the differences in UI paradigms. (3) the fact that the widgets look much less refined and sleek than their gnome counterparts (before you say anything, I will make the point that ClearLooks is _NOW_ The default packaged look with GNOME 2.12.) And the default one with Etoile is Nesedah, which is also pretty fancy, so it's out of question for me. ;-) We need to look at this picture and take pause because it gives us what we need to do to play nicer... i do notice the XDG patch, and it seems to work pretty well, the icons show up in the task bar :-) Thoughts? discussions? -Thom Regards -- Saso ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Clash of the Titans, GNUstep alongside GNOME
On 26 Nov 2005, at 17:16, Nicolas Roard wrote: This is why I'm concerned that we should - 1. keep the current interface as default 2. provide themes for the other interfaces 3. make switching VERY easy 4. try to make things interoperate as well as possible even when we are not using themes to make things match. Yes. There's actually three levels for good integration though: - the look -- that will be managed via gsdrawfunctions, not really a problem - the feel -- more difficult; under windows you want menu-in- windows, etc - integration with system services like pasteboard, etc I'm not sure how we can manage #2 and #3 ... one possibility would be to have so-called desktop bundles that modify classes to properly integrate... and/or have specific gorms for the platform.. Well ... integration with pasteboards, drag and drop etc is, and long has been, the responsibility of the backend ... and while it may not be working wonderfully for all systems, the basic idea is that pasteboard and DnD should operate seamlessly in conjunction with the native versions while retaining any extra functionality that the OpenStep API provides ... at least, retaining the extra functionality between GNUstep apps, it's impossible to guarantee more than the 'native' functionality between gnustep and non-gnustep apps. The feel is tricky ... there are certain things we may not want to give up or we may consider too horrible to do (for instance, I think focus-follows-mouse in X may be one of those unless we figure out a new focus/activation strategy), but others can be dealt with on an individual basis and built into the theme engine as loadable code in theme bundles. The current gui/backend architecture is a good example of how this can be done ... major classes can implement chunks of their functionality as methods sent to the current theme engine. The default theme object would be set up to point to the built-in implementations always present in the gui library. I don't think we can realistically plan ahead on this completely ... but will have to release new versions of the gui with new themable features when we find we need them. I'm unsure about how these methods would be best managed, but one possibility would be for the theme creators to write subclasses of standard gui classes which add no ivars ... so the theme engine could load those subclasses in the bundle, get the pointers to the method implementations and use them when the standard gui classes call the methods in the them engine. I'd quite enjoy writing code to handle loading/switching of themes like that. ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37
On 11/26/05, Michael Thaler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Saturday 26 November 2005 16:54, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote: Since I think we have easily the best look and feel on large/modern displays, obviously changing the look/feel would be a BAD idea on those systems. However, the rest I agree with ... we need themes for Personally, I don't like the original nextstep/openstep look (I have a HP gecko with nextstep on it). I think it is dull and boring. And this has nothing todo with having a small display (mine is 17'' with 1280x1024 which is fine). think Plastik is a very nice theme, it is simplistic, but not totally boring. Have a look at: http://users.physik.tu-muenchen.de/mthaler/gnustep_plastik1.jpg http://users.physik.tu-muenchen.de/mthaler/gnustep_plastik2.jpg It is far from perfect, but I think Plastik looks also nice with gnustep and the gnustep applications now fit in quite well into my KDE desktop. However, the theme is not complete yet. Pretty cool, indeed ! is it a Camaelon theme ? care to make it available ? :-) I should probably update properly the camaelon webpage and put the available themes to download... I also do not like the gnustep icons too much. Have a look at http://www.oxygen-icons.org/?cat=3 This will be the default icon theme for KDE4. I think they look quite nice. Is it somehow possible to change the gnustep icons or create icon themes? I dislike them ;-) (too clunky) but the possiblity of changing gnustep icons exists. There's a file you can change to select which icon to load. Though, it should probably be simpler, as simple as putting an Icon theme bundle in your ~/GNUstep/ directory.. Another thing I'd like to see is thought on how to integrate better into non-gnustep environments, as this seems a fairly obvious first stage to getting people to look at GNUstep. For instance, app icons That is my point. Right now gnustep is basically only interesting for ex-nextstep users and some other geeks. And that is a shame. indeed. -- Nicolas Roard Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37
On Saturday 26 November 2005 20:40, Nicolas Roard wrote: Pretty cool, indeed ! is it a Camaelon theme ? care to make it available ? :-) I should probably update properly the camaelon webpage and put the available themes to download... Yes, it is a Camaelon theme. Of course you can put it on the camaelon webpage. I'll send it to you when it is finished. Right now, some things are still missing. I dislike them ;-) (too clunky) but the possiblity of changing gnustep icons exists. There's a file you can change to select which icon to load. Though, it should probably be simpler, as simple as putting an Icon theme bundle in your ~/GNUstep/ directory.. That would be nice. There is also the Tango project which creates a new iconset for GNOME (and KDE). http://tango-project.org/Tango_Desktop_Project Some examples: http://tango-project.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines#a_KDE_artist They also want to create a standard icon naming specification. I hope the KDE people will also follow this naming specification with Oxygen. It would be nice if gnustep could also use it, so that GNOME/KDE icon themes would simply work with gnustep (gnustep should probably still have its own default icon theme, but the possibility to use icon themes from GNOME and KDE would be great). Would it be in prinicple possible to have a Mac-like menu on top? I guess there are some good reasons for the vertical, next like menu, but personally I would like to have the option to have the menu on top. Greetings, Michael ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37
On 11/26/05, Michael Thaler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Saturday 26 November 2005 20:40, Nicolas Roard wrote: Pretty cool, indeed ! is it a Camaelon theme ? care to make it available ? :-) I should probably update properly the camaelon webpage and put the available themes to download... Yes, it is a Camaelon theme. Of course you can put it on the camaelon webpage. I'll send it to you when it is finished. Right now, some things are still missing. cool ! Once it's done I'll set up some page that list the available themes.. There's a file you can change to select which icon to load. Though, it should probably be simpler, as simple as putting an Icon theme bundle in your ~/GNUstep/ directory.. That would be nice. There is also the Tango project which creates a new iconset for GNOME (and KDE). http://tango-project.org/Tango_Desktop_Project Some examples: http://tango-project.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines#a_KDE_artist They also want to create a standard icon naming specification. I hope the KDE people will also follow this naming specification with Oxygen. It would be nice if gnustep could also use it, so that GNOME/KDE icon themes would simply work with gnustep (gnustep should probably still have its own default icon theme, but the possibility to use icon themes from GNOME and KDE would be great). Probably, yes. Would it be in prinicple possible to have a Mac-like menu on top? I guess there are some good reasons for the vertical, next like menu, but personally I would like to have the option to have the menu on top. Yes, you can use WildMenu: http://www.cc.utah.edu/~msh3/WildMenus-0.06.tgz Not sure if it works with camaelon though (it used to). I'll try it. -- Nicolas Roard Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Tango_Desktop_Project
David, There is a SVG viewer for GNUstep available and it contains an SVGImageRep. It's by Alex M., it would be nice to have it integrated into GNUstep, if possible. GJC --- David Wetzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Michael Thaler wrote: That would be nice. There is also the Tango project which creates a new iconset for GNOME (and KDE). http://tango-project.org/Tango_Desktop_Project looks nice. I noticed that they also provide a SVG version of the icons. It would be really cool if NSImage could open SVG files too :-) dave --- _ _ _(_)(_)_ David Wetzel, Turbocat's Development, (_) __ (_) Buchhorster Strasse 23, D-16567 Muehlenbeck/Berlin, FRG, _/ \_ Fax +49 33056 82835 Phone +49 33056 82834 (__) http://www.turbocat.de/ ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep Gregory John Casamento -- Principal Consultant, Open Logic Corp. (A MD Corp.) ## Maintainer of Gorm (IB Equiv.) for GNUstep. ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37
Michael Thaler wrote: The problem with this is, that gnustep is not useable as a desktop at all right now. For instance, there is no browser, so you have to use Firefox or Konqueror or any other browser of your choice and gnustep apps and KDE/GNOME apps just don't work very well together because of issues like horizontal menu bar vs. vertical menubar. Furthermore, under KDE gnustep is basically not usable at all. The gnustep menu doesn't work correctly. I don't know if this is a kwin bug or a gnustep bug. Could you please be a bit more specific here? I must admit that I am using KDE on a dayly base, but apart from the annyoing focus bug I don't see much problems with the menu, when it gets displayed it is usable. Fred ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Clash of the Titans, GNUstep alongside GNOME
Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote: On 26 Nov 2005, at 17:16, Nicolas Roard wrote: This is why I'm concerned that we should - 1. keep the current interface as default 2. provide themes for the other interfaces 3. make switching VERY easy 4. try to make things interoperate as well as possible even when we are not using themes to make things match. Yes. There's actually three levels for good integration though: - the look -- that will be managed via gsdrawfunctions, not really a problem - the feel -- more difficult; under windows you want menu-in- windows, etc - integration with system services like pasteboard, etc I'm not sure how we can manage #2 and #3 ... one possibility would be to have so-called desktop bundles that modify classes to properly integrate... and/or have specific gorms for the platform.. I'd quite enjoy writing code to handle loading/switching of themes like that. Question is, how would you handle unloading? Regards, Sheldon ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
