Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Hi, I'm one of them. I got interested into GNUstep also because of it looks. I love windowmaker. It is the only thing I use on free Unices. It is sleek, unobtrusive, professional. The same should be true for GNUstep. GNUstep stuff is generally almost there, but there are drawing glitches, ugly icons, imperfectly done interfaces which makes it not on par with openstep. And we should be even better. Improved, more complete. I really dislike the term looks professional. How do you define looks professional? I think the only sane definition of looks professional is that something that looks professional is something that is used for professional work. By this definition Windows XP / Vista, KDE, Gnome and MacOS X all look professional because they are used for professional work. Why is a user interface more professional if all buttons are squared, everything is gray and there are no gradients? In my opinion, to do professional work, it is much more important to have professional tools (IDEs etc.) then to have no gradients and square buttons. Also, this concept of outdated is really ridiculous. Style has no time. People like Rolex. Waterman. Montblanc. Breguet. People like Vetiver, 4711 Koelnisch Wasser. People like Veuve Cliquot Poinsardin. These items are made as our fathers or our grand-fatehrs could have bought them. Serious people like them because they are masterpieces. Well, most people I know (scientists, engineers etc.) think that wasting money for a Rolex is ridiculous. I don't even think that a Rolex looks good. I consider a Rolex a status symbol that is not worth its money because you can get better, cheaper, better looking (this is my personal opinion) for less money. Maybe you consider scientists and engineer not serious people, but I do and I know lots of serious people (by my definition) that consider all you mentioned above as waste of money. And I don't buy that masterpieces made by our farthers cannot be improved. Imagine you build a real masterpiece carriage one hundred years ago when there were no cars. How many people would buy a carriage instead of an ordinary car today just because the carriage is a real masterpiece and an ordinary car is just an ordinary car? The NeXTSTEP GUI was designed fifteen years ago when it was basically not possible to have round buttons, gradients, transparency, shadows etc. because the hardware was not powerful enough for that. But the world moved on and today almost nobody wants to have square buttons, no gradients etc. (There are certainly people today which would prefer to have a masterpiece carriage instead of an ordinary car, but most people that just need something to go to work would certainly take the car). Now of course, other people change dresses every few months, have a Swatch, use the latest perfume from Kiko or Pupa or whatever. They drink some fashion-drink like bacardi breezer. So what? People did not use cell-phones, GPS receivers, DVD burners, 1 TB hard drives etc. 20 years ago. Now they do. Is that a good thing or a bad? The gnustep project is about 15 years old, older then both KDE and GNOME. How many developers does gnustep have today and how many does KDE (or GNOME) have? Why are there so many people working on KDE and GNOME, but almost none working on Gnustep? Looking at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Gnustep.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/KDE_4.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/Gnome-2.28.png I guess most people start a gnustep application exactly once. After that they probably stay with KDE or GNOME. Obviously there is a minority that prefers the NeXTSTEP look. And if it is the aim of gnustep to develop applications / a desktop for this minority, then there is nothing wrong with the direction the gnustep project is going. But if the gnustep projects wants to increase the number of users and developers, I think it is absolutely necessary to improve / change the look and feel to something more familiar / pleasent for typical OSS users. Greetings, Michael ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Hi, The gray and dull has nothing to do with it but, rather, the lack of glitter. I happen to work for a big company and while we use PCs with Windows XP (using it's default theme), the tools made specifically for us use the old Win NT look from the mid 90's. In fact one monitoring tool remotely running on some UNIX system and it's made with Motif. I've never seen any professional use glittery interfaces, they go for more neutral looking ones. I work for a company that develops software for the German Space Operation Center. They use Linux with KDE and Windows XP in all their control rooms. Why should something like Expose, window shadows or animations or transparancy make a user interface less useable? It can certainly make it less useable if overused, but it can also make it more useable when used at the right places. No argument there, everyone has different taste. So this is a case, in my own opinion, to favour skins in GNUstep as done via Chameleon for instance. I doubt that this is a solution. I doubt it is possible to make KDE or GNOME look like Snow Leopard. There was the Baghira theme which did quite some hackish things but even with Baghira the look and feel of KDE was not really similar to MacOS X. I once created a style for Chameleon (a KDE3 plastik style). At that time it was bitmap based and I doubt that it is possible to create a style that even resembles Snow Leopard. I don't say that gnustep should adopt Snow Leopard's Look Feel. But I think gnustep should adopt a more modern default Look Feel that is more familiar to people coming from Windows, KDE, Gnome or MacOS X. My former institute used KDE as desktop. But people usually worked with Mathematica or MatLab. If we did coding it was mostly low-level numerical stuff in Fortran, C or C++. I doubt that it is a good idea to target researchers with gnustep. What advantage would gnustep give them? No less than the ones you mentioned, and more considering GNUstep is way more advanced in terms of usability and consistency. NeXTSTEP was used at universities back in the 90's because it was way better then other systems. But the world changed, Windows / Linux with KDE or GNOME is good enough for people today. Developing applications with ObjC/gnustep might be easier / more convenient then developing applications with say C++/Qt, but it is not a fundamental improvement. And back in the 90's Windows was not as dominant as it is today. Today most people are familar with the Windows GUI (even scientists / researchers) and it is always hard to get used to something new. gnustep Look Feel is radically different from what people are used and I guess most people prefer toolkits that enables them to write applications that has a Look Feel people are used to. behind some other compilers. As for GC, do you REALLY want that? I think it's way overrated. It tends to encourage bad programming practices, and usually kills performance. Yes. I have to code Java / .Net at work and I think GC is one of the things I like about Java and .Net. I know you can still have memory leaks, but GC allows me to think about the problem I want to solve without having to think about allocating / freeing memory all the time. Newever versions of the JVM include stack allocation and the garbage first collector, I don't think you'll have any performance problems with that. Michael ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
I want to remind you all of a discussion on gnustep-ui which took place years ago: http://jesseross.com/clients/gnustep/ui/concepts/01/ui.png This is grey, too. But it still looks pretty :) TOM Zitat von Michael Thaler michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de: Hi, The gray and dull has nothing to do with it but, rather, the lack of glitter. I happen to work for a big company and while we use PCs with Windows XP (using it's default theme), the tools made specifically for us use the old Win NT look from the mid 90's. In fact one monitoring tool remotely running on some UNIX system and it's made with Motif. I've never seen any professional use glittery interfaces, they go for more neutral looking ones. I work for a company that develops software for the German Space Operation Center. They use Linux with KDE and Windows XP in all their control rooms. Why should something like Expose, window shadows or animations or transparancy make a user interface less useable? It can certainly make it less useable if overused, but it can also make it more useable when used at the right places. No argument there, everyone has different taste. So this is a case, in my own opinion, to favour skins in GNUstep as done via Chameleon for instance. I doubt that this is a solution. I doubt it is possible to make KDE or GNOME look like Snow Leopard. There was the Baghira theme which did quite some hackish things but even with Baghira the look and feel of KDE was not really similar to MacOS X. I once created a style for Chameleon (a KDE3 plastik style). At that time it was bitmap based and I doubt that it is possible to create a style that even resembles Snow Leopard. I don't say that gnustep should adopt Snow Leopard's Look Feel. But I think gnustep should adopt a more modern default Look Feel that is more familiar to people coming from Windows, KDE, Gnome or MacOS X. My former institute used KDE as desktop. But people usually worked with Mathematica or MatLab. If we did coding it was mostly low-level numerical stuff in Fortran, C or C++. I doubt that it is a good idea to target researchers with gnustep. What advantage would gnustep give them? No less than the ones you mentioned, and more considering GNUstep is way more advanced in terms of usability and consistency. NeXTSTEP was used at universities back in the 90's because it was way better then other systems. But the world changed, Windows / Linux with KDE or GNOME is good enough for people today. Developing applications with ObjC/gnustep might be easier / more convenient then developing applications with say C++/Qt, but it is not a fundamental improvement. And back in the 90's Windows was not as dominant as it is today. Today most people are familar with the Windows GUI (even scientists / researchers) and it is always hard to get used to something new. gnustep Look Feel is radically different from what people are used and I guess most people prefer toolkits that enables them to write applications that has a Look Feel people are used to. behind some other compilers. As for GC, do you REALLY want that? I think it's way overrated. It tends to encourage bad programming practices, and usually kills performance. Yes. I have to code Java / .Net at work and I think GC is one of the things I like about Java and .Net. I know you can still have memory leaks, but GC allows me to think about the problem I want to solve without having to think about allocating / freeing memory all the time. Newever versions of the JVM include stack allocation and the garbage first collector, I don't think you'll have any performance problems with that. Michael ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
On 9 Oct 2009, at 21:29, Markus Hitter wrote: Am 09.10.2009 um 20:23 schrieb David Chisnall: On 9 Oct 2009, at 19:19, Gregory Casamento wrote: Well, yeah... I do know about pbxbuild since I helped develop it. The point is that the majority of mac devs expect things to be done completely from the mac. My point was that this is something we could automate pretty trivially. I managed to get Darwine building (but not running) Windows versions of GNUstep apps, and it would be pretty simple to package up a virtual appliance that people could open with VirtualBox on their Mac and just point at an svn repository and get automated builds. Same with Darwine; we could package up a .wine directory containing GNUstep with this. Does this mean GNUstep cross-development can be done from within Xcode already or do you want to use Darwine to run ProjectCenter/ Gorm for development? For the later, I fear this isn't exactly what developers mean with completely on the Mac. Currently, pbxbuild doesn't run under Darwine, so I had to generate the GNUmakefile by hand, but I did set up one project with an 'external build system' step in XCode that ssh'd to a VM and ran pbxbuild there. It's not how I'd want to work, but it does work for producing Linux / *BSD binaries. We could quite easily produce a VirtualBox appliance that had a small Linux / GNUstep install and a build script that can be used from XCode to rsync the project into the VM and then run pbxbuild on it. An ability to run/debug GNUstep/Windows executables on the Mac would be a nice addition, though. Unfortunately, for some reason, GNUstep/Windows apps didn't work at all in WINE for me. David -- Sent from my PDP-11 ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Hi, 1. Marketing to get people to give us a look. To see what? A user interface that most people consider looking really dated? Here are some numbers from the 2006 Linux Deskop Survey: http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi- bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archiveid=0821200617613 BlackBox 1.6 % GNOME 35.1 % Enlightenment 3.8 % Fluxbox 3.9 % IceWM 3.2 % KDE 37.7 % WindowMaker 2.2 % Xfce 9.8 % Other (please email us) I could not find any results for 2008 or 2009 but I doubt that the market share of WindowMaker increased. Don't you think that a huge majority of Linux users prefer a more modern looking desktop environment with some eye-candy and will be just dissapointed if the see gnustep in its current state? I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing I did at work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic mode because I prefer Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look compared to Aero. On the other hand, I think Snow Leopard looks quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look sort of ok. But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it is a masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something using gnustep, the old-fashened Look Feel kills my motivation because I think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am actually a former KDE developer). 2. Eye-candy to draw people in and get them to try things out (changing the default theme won't do that ... we need to have a group of three or four good themes to appeal to different people) For me, the fundametal question is what direction gnustep wants to take. Does gnustep want to appeal to former NeXTSTEP/Openstep users? Or does gnustep want to be a MacOS X for Linux and other OSS operating systems? In the former case I am not really interested in gnustep. Openstep/gnustep might provide a nice API, maybe it is even a bit nicer then Qt, but I don't really see gnustep being adopted widely if it just tries to provide an Openstep-like API with a Nextstep-like inteface. If gnustep aims to provide APIs and a desktop environement similar to MacOS X I would be very interested. But I don't think gnustep can do both. Either it will continue to try something similar to Openstep or it will change direction and try to be something similar to MacOS X. A simple theme will not be enough to make a gnustep desktop really look cute and appealing. 3. Enough good quality stuff so that people don't try once and then give up. For this to happen, gnustep needs more developers. In my opinion the only way that this can happen is if more people start to use gnustep. Apparently gnustep did not attract a lot of users / developers for the last 15 years. So maybe it is time to change direction? Greetings, Michael ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Micheal, I couldn't have said it much better myself. GNUstep's current look is good enough for some, but it's not inspiring new membership. I, personally, like the current look myself, but I realize that many people are looking for something more modern. This is why theming is so important.I would say that apps are of equal significance in this equation. GC On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Michael Thaler michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de wrote: Hi, 1. Marketing to get people to give us a look. To see what? A user interface that most people consider looking really dated? Here are some numbers from the 2006 Linux Deskop Survey: http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi- bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archiveid=0821200617613 BlackBox 1.6 % GNOME 35.1 % Enlightenment 3.8 % Fluxbox 3.9 % IceWM 3.2 % KDE 37.7 % WindowMaker 2.2 % Xfce 9.8 % Other (please email us) I could not find any results for 2008 or 2009 but I doubt that the market share of WindowMaker increased. Don't you think that a huge majority of Linux users prefer a more modern looking desktop environment with some eye-candy and will be just dissapointed if the see gnustep in its current state? I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing I did at work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic mode because I prefer Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look compared to Aero. On the other hand, I think Snow Leopard looks quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look sort of ok. But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it is a masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something using gnustep, the old-fashened Look Feel kills my motivation because I think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am actually a former KDE developer). 2. Eye-candy to draw people in and get them to try things out (changing the default theme won't do that ... we need to have a group of three or four good themes to appeal to different people) For me, the fundametal question is what direction gnustep wants to take. Does gnustep want to appeal to former NeXTSTEP/Openstep users? Or does gnustep want to be a MacOS X for Linux and other OSS operating systems? In the former case I am not really interested in gnustep. Openstep/gnustep might provide a nice API, maybe it is even a bit nicer then Qt, but I don't really see gnustep being adopted widely if it just tries to provide an Openstep-like API with a Nextstep-like inteface. If gnustep aims to provide APIs and a desktop environement similar to MacOS X I would be very interested. But I don't think gnustep can do both. Either it will continue to try something similar to Openstep or it will change direction and try to be something similar to MacOS X. A simple theme will not be enough to make a gnustep desktop really look cute and appealing. 3. Enough good quality stuff so that people don't try once and then give up. For this to happen, gnustep needs more developers. In my opinion the only way that this can happen is if more people start to use gnustep. Apparently gnustep did not attract a lot of users / developers for the last 15 years. So maybe it is time to change direction? Greetings, Michael ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep -- Gregory Casamento Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant ## GNUstep Chief Maintainer yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa (240)274-9630 (Cell), (301)362-9640 (Home) ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Terminal.app and fonts
El 9 de octubre de 2009 20:36, Fred Kiefer fredkie...@gmx.de escribió:
Pablo Giménez schrieb:
Well I found the problem.
It not was in the type or size of the font, although there is a bug in
the
font panel.
But the reason because the terminal wasn't working is because the
charatcer
encoding, i set it to utf8 (unicode) and this cause the terminal to
crash,
another bug maybe
Now my problem is that I can use only the courier, I think size 9, any
time
I change to another font I got an error like I can't find the font, like
this:
2009-10-09 10:27:24.552 Terminal[16829] XGFont: selected font: Helvetica
at
9.00 (-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal--9-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1) is not
available.
2009-10-09 10:27:24.553 Terminal[16829] The font specified for NSFont,
Helvetica, can't be found.
2009-10-09 10:27:24.553 Terminal[16829] XGFont: selected font: Helvetica
at
9.00 (-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal--9-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1) is not
available.
2009-10-09 10:27:24.640 Terminal[16829] NSFont NSFont: 0x120c7e0
Helvetica
12.000 0.000 0.000 12.000 0.000 0.000 N P 0 info XGFontInfo: 0x1214810
size 12 {x = 1; y = 0; width = 7; height = 9} 1
As you can see the NSFont is set to Helvetica and size to 12, but XGFont
is
still trying to look for size 9, which doesn't exists in my system.
Can this be realted with the backend, I am using Cairo, would be better
to
use libart???
Most definitely your aren't using cairo, you are using the old xlib
backend as can be seen from the class XGFontInfo or by the other
messages you are getting. Even this backend is capable of providing anti
aliased fonts, when asked to. Use:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain GSFontAntiAlias YES
Ok I have checked again the configure stage and seems that the configure
script can't find the Xft and freetype includes, so probably the backend
even using xlib is not able to use Xft and freetype.
I got these errors using the next configure statement:
./configure --enable-server=x11
And this is the output:
checking for X... libraries /usr/lib64, headers
checking whether -R must be followed by a space... neither works
checking for gethostbyname... yes
checking for connect... yes
checking for remove... yes
checking for shmat... yes
checking for IceConnectionNumber in -lICE... yes
checking for main in -lXext... yes
checking for main in -lXt... yes
checking for main in -lXmu... yes
checking for X11 function prototypes... yes
checking DPS/dpsclient.h usability... no
checking DPS/dpsclient.h presence... no
checking for DPS/dpsclient.h... no
checking DPS/dpsNXargs.h usability... no
checking DPS/dpsNXargs.h presence... no
checking for DPS/dpsNXargs.h... no
checking ft2build.h usability... no
checking ft2build.h presence... no
checking for ft2build.h... no
checking for pkg-config... /tools/SITE/rnd/bin/Linux64/pkg-config
checking for xft... checking for XftFontOpen in -lXft... yes
checking X11/Xft/Xft.h usability... no
checking X11/Xft/Xft.h presence... no
checking for X11/Xft/Xft.h... no
checking for glXMakeContextCurrent in -lGL... yes
checking GL/glx.h usability... yes
checking GL/glx.h presence... yes
checking for GL/glx.h... yes
checking for GLX_RGBA_TYPE... yes
checking for usleep... yes
checking for X11/extensions/XShm.h... yes
checking for shmctl... yes
checking for XInternAtoms in -lX11... yes
checking for main in -lgdi32... no
checking for main in -lmsimg32... no
checking for main in -lopengl32... no
checking windows.h usability... no
checking windows.h presence... no
checking for windows.h... no
checking for libart2... none
checking for cairo... checking for cairo-ft... checking for cairo-xlib...
checking for cairo-win32... checking for cairo-glitz... checking for
XRenderFindVisualFormat
in -lXrender... yes
checking Backend Server... x11
checking Backend Graphics... art
configure: WARNING: can't find freetype, required for graphics=art
configure: Switching to xlib
checking Backend name... back
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating back.make
config.status: creating config.make
config.status: creating config.h
config.status: config.h is unchanged
The thing is that I have checked and I have all the Xft includes in
/usr/include/X11/Xft/
Also the freetype includes are here: /usr/include/freetype2/freetype/
How can I do to instruct the configure script to look for includes in these
directories???
thx
Cheers
Fred
--
Un saludo
Best Regards
Pablo Giménez
___
Discuss-gnustep mailing list
Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 8:01 AM, Michael Thaler michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de wrote: Hi, 1. Marketing to get people to give us a look. To see what? A user interface that most people consider looking really dated? Here are some numbers from the 2006 Linux Deskop Survey: http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi- bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archiveid=0821200617613http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-%0Abin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archiveid=0821200617613 BlackBox 1.6 % GNOME 35.1 % Enlightenment 3.8 % Fluxbox 3.9 % IceWM 3.2 % KDE 37.7 % WindowMaker 2.2 % Xfce 9.8 % Other (please email us) I could not find any results for 2008 or 2009 but I doubt that the market share of WindowMaker increased. Don't you think that a huge majority of Linux users prefer a more modern looking desktop environment with some eye-candy and will be just dissapointed if the see gnustep in its current state? I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing I did at work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic mode because I prefer Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look compared to Aero. On the other hand, I think Snow Leopard looks quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look sort of ok. But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it is a masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something using gnustep, the old-fashened Look Feel kills my motivation because I think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am actually a former KDE developer). I just completely disagree with your arguments here. So what if you like eye-candy? Riccardo and Richard like the grey NeXT look, and using the mailing list as the sample space I would say it's divided roughly 60/40 for the NeXT look over the so called eye-candy. Have anyone here using GTK or Qt applications ever actually built these from scratch? I would assume no, because the idea of an easy install always comes up. I've personally next built Qt, but have done GTK. Simple put, it's hell! You have 15 dependencies you need to satisfy before GTK even configures without an error, and another 10 dependencies to get decent support for everything you want ( http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/x/gtk2.html everything in Required + their dependencies). Then, after you're all done with that you still end up with a dull and grey look... so you go out and install the clearlooks theme engine. How is that any easier than building GNUstep? I can truthly say, it's not. I still say we need distribution support, which the little that we do have we seem to be loosing. How do we get their support? Marketing will become much easier if all we need to say is do apt-get install gnustep-core gworkspace instead of grab the sources from svn and compile. To be honest, I don't like WindowMaker. don't like using and think those icons are a waste of my precious screen space. What I'll generally try to do is use nothing but GNUstep applications with no window manager (since GNUstep supports it, even though it has issues). On top of all that, GNUstep has a serious identity crisis. It's such a far departure from the usual Gnome/KDE/Windows desktop metaphore. So you end up with the problem that most people expect you provide at least a half working desktop in order to feel comfortable, but that's not GNUstep's goal, it's just a development environment. You can see that littered all over Michael's post, he's trying to compare GNUstep with KDE and Gnome instead of with Qt and GTK (+ GLib and GDK). Etoile is definitly working to bridge that gap, but even so it's not easy to get it. I personally do not build all of Etoile because it's just simply too much work. I would not use Gnome if I had to build it everytime either. 2. Eye-candy to draw people in and get them to try things out (changing the default theme won't do that ... we need to have a group of three or four good themes to appeal to different people) For me, the fundametal question is what direction gnustep wants to take. Does gnustep want to appeal to former NeXTSTEP/Openstep users? Or does gnustep want to be a MacOS X for Linux and other OSS operating systems? In the former case I am not really interested in gnustep. Openstep/gnustep might provide a nice API, maybe it is even a bit nicer then Qt, but I don't really see gnustep being adopted widely if it just tries to provide an Openstep-like API with a Nextstep-like inteface. If gnustep aims to provide APIs and a desktop environement similar to MacOS X I would be very interested. But I don't think gnustep can do both. Either it will continue to try something similar to Openstep or it will change direction and try to be something similar to MacOS X. A simple theme will
Re: Terminal.app and fonts
El 10 de octubre de 2009 15:14, Pablo Giménez pablog...@gmail.comescribió:
El 9 de octubre de 2009 20:36, Fred Kiefer fredkie...@gmx.de escribió:
Pablo Giménez schrieb:
Well I found the problem.
It not was in the type or size of the font, although there is a bug in
the
font panel.
But the reason because the terminal wasn't working is because the
charatcer
encoding, i set it to utf8 (unicode) and this cause the terminal to
crash,
another bug maybe
Now my problem is that I can use only the courier, I think size 9, any
time
I change to another font I got an error like I can't find the font, like
this:
2009-10-09 10:27:24.552 Terminal[16829] XGFont: selected font: Helvetica
at
9.00 (-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal--9-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1) is not
available.
2009-10-09 10:27:24.553 Terminal[16829] The font specified for NSFont,
Helvetica, can't be found.
2009-10-09 10:27:24.553 Terminal[16829] XGFont: selected font: Helvetica
at
9.00 (-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal--9-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1) is not
available.
2009-10-09 10:27:24.640 Terminal[16829] NSFont NSFont: 0x120c7e0
Helvetica
12.000 0.000 0.000 12.000 0.000 0.000 N P 0 info XGFontInfo: 0x1214810
size 12 {x = 1; y = 0; width = 7; height = 9} 1
As you can see the NSFont is set to Helvetica and size to 12, but XGFont
is
still trying to look for size 9, which doesn't exists in my system.
Can this be realted with the backend, I am using Cairo, would be better
to
use libart???
Most definitely your aren't using cairo, you are using the old xlib
backend as can be seen from the class XGFontInfo or by the other
messages you are getting. Even this backend is capable of providing anti
aliased fonts, when asked to. Use:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain GSFontAntiAlias YES
Ok I have checked again the configure stage and seems that the configure
script can't find the Xft and freetype includes, so probably the backend
even using xlib is not able to use Xft and freetype.
I got these errors using the next configure statement:
./configure --enable-server=x11
And this is the output:
checking for X... libraries /usr/lib64, headers
checking whether -R must be followed by a space... neither works
checking for gethostbyname... yes
checking for connect... yes
checking for remove... yes
checking for shmat... yes
checking for IceConnectionNumber in -lICE... yes
checking for main in -lXext... yes
checking for main in -lXt... yes
checking for main in -lXmu... yes
checking for X11 function prototypes... yes
checking DPS/dpsclient.h usability... no
checking DPS/dpsclient.h presence... no
checking for DPS/dpsclient.h... no
checking DPS/dpsNXargs.h usability... no
checking DPS/dpsNXargs.h presence... no
checking for DPS/dpsNXargs.h... no
checking ft2build.h usability... no
checking ft2build.h presence... no
checking for ft2build.h... no
checking for pkg-config... /tools/SITE/rnd/bin/Linux64/pkg-config
checking for xft... checking for XftFontOpen in -lXft... yes
checking X11/Xft/Xft.h usability... no
checking X11/Xft/Xft.h presence... no
checking for X11/Xft/Xft.h... no
checking for glXMakeContextCurrent in -lGL... yes
checking GL/glx.h usability... yes
checking GL/glx.h presence... yes
checking for GL/glx.h... yes
checking for GLX_RGBA_TYPE... yes
checking for usleep... yes
checking for X11/extensions/XShm.h... yes
checking for shmctl... yes
checking for XInternAtoms in -lX11... yes
checking for main in -lgdi32... no
checking for main in -lmsimg32... no
checking for main in -lopengl32... no
checking windows.h usability... no
checking windows.h presence... no
checking for windows.h... no
checking for libart2... none
checking for cairo... checking for cairo-ft... checking for cairo-xlib...
checking for cairo-win32... checking for cairo-glitz... checking for
XRenderFindVisualFormat
in -lXrender... yes
checking Backend Server... x11
checking Backend Graphics... art
configure: WARNING: can't find freetype, required for graphics=art
configure: Switching to xlib
checking Backend name... back
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating back.make
config.status: creating config.make
config.status: creating config.h
config.status: config.h is unchanged
The thing is that I have checked and I have all the Xft includes in
/usr/include/X11/Xft/
Also the freetype includes are here: /usr/include/freetype2/freetype/
More info about this problem, I found this in the config.log:
/usr/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h:42:10: error: #include expects FILENAME or
FILENAME
In file included from conftest.c:57:
/usr/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h:62: error: expected '=', ',', ';', 'asm' or
'__attribute__' before '_XftFTlibrary'
/usr/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h:96: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list
before 'FT_UInt'
/usr/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h:103: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list
before 'FT_UInt'
/usr/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h:200: error: expected ';', ',' or ')'
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Stef, On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Stef Bidi stefanb...@gmail.com wrote: snip But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it is a masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something using gnustep, the old-fashened Look Feel kills my motivation because I think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am actually a former KDE developer). I just completely disagree with your arguments here. So what if you like eye-candy? Riccardo and Richard like the grey NeXT look, and using the mailing list as the sample space I would say it's divided roughly 60/40 for the NeXT look over the so called eye-candy. The problem is that the current look does not inspire new developers to keep working on GNUstep apps because the look is very spartan and old fashioned. Looks do matter to some people (perhaps more than they should, in my opinion). Have anyone here using GTK or Qt applications ever actually built these from scratch? I would assume no, because the idea of an easy install always comes up. I've personally next built Qt, but have done GTK. Simple put, it's hell! You have 15 dependencies you need to satisfy before GTK even configures without an error, and another 10 dependencies to get decent support for everything you want (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/x/gtk2.html everything in Required + their dependencies). Then, after you're all done with that you still end up with a dull and grey look... so you go out and install the clearlooks theme engine. How is that any easier than building GNUstep? I can truthly say, it's not. I still say we need distribution support, which the little that we do have we seem to be loosing. How do we get their support? Marketing will become much easier if all we need to say is do apt-get install gnustep-core gworkspace instead of grab the sources from svn and compile. Indeed. Part of the problem, though, is some distributions stick to the FHS as if it's gospel. On Debian they put our stuff into the weirdest places so that GNUstep will conform to the standard. Also, they (Debian) tend to have VERY old packages for GNUstep which gives a bad impression of our stuff. To be honest, I don't like WindowMaker. don't like using and think those icons are a waste of my precious screen space. What I'll generally try to do is use nothing but GNUstep applications with no window manager (since GNUstep supports it, even though it has issues). Indeed. What I would like to see is better integration between GNUstep and other Window Managers including GNOME and KDE. I would also like to see the new window manager from Etoile. On top of all that, GNUstep has a serious identity crisis. It's such a far departure from the usual Gnome/KDE/Windows desktop metaphore. So you end up with the problem that most people expect you provide at least a half working desktop in order to feel comfortable, but that's not GNUstep's goal, it's just a development environment. You can see that littered all over Michael's post, he's trying to compare GNUstep with KDE and Gnome instead of with Qt and GTK (+ GLib and GDK). Etoile is definitly working to bridge that gap, but even so it's not easy to get it. I personally do not build all of Etoile because it's just simply too much work. I would not use Gnome if I had to build it everytime either. GNUstep does have an identity crisis. By collaborating with Etoile I'm hoping to deal with that. GNUstep is to Etoile what GTK is to GNOME. We are the framework on which they build. We provide the fundamental support structure. 2. Eye-candy to draw people in and get them to try things out (changing the default theme won't do that ... we need to have a group of three or four good themes to appeal to different people) For me, the fundametal question is what direction gnustep wants to take. Does gnustep want to appeal to former NeXTSTEP/Openstep users? Or does gnustep want to be a MacOS X for Linux and other OSS operating systems? In the former case I am not really interested in gnustep. Openstep/gnustep might provide a nice API, maybe it is even a bit nicer then Qt, but I don't really see gnustep being adopted widely if it just tries to provide an Openstep-like API with a Nextstep-like inteface. If gnustep aims to provide APIs and a desktop environement similar to MacOS X I would be very interested. But I don't think gnustep can do both. Either it will continue to try something similar to Openstep or it will change direction and try to be something similar to MacOS X. A simple theme will not be enough to make a gnustep desktop really look cute and appealing. Again with the eye-candy. GNUstep doesn't need to be providing this by default, and no
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Hi, I just completely disagree with your arguments here. So what if you like eye-candy? Riccardo and Richard like the grey NeXT look, and using the mailing list as the sample space I would say it's divided roughly 60/40 for the NeXT look over the so called eye-candy. My point is not that I like eye-candy (I actually do not like too much eye- candy). My point is that apparently the majority of people like a more modern look for their desktop enivornements. Here are some numbers for the usage share of desktop environements: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems The market share of Windows is roughly 93%, Mac OS X is roughly 4.5% and Linux roughly 1%. Other operating systems are about 2%. On Linux most people use either KDE or Gnome. So basically 98% of all desktop operating systems used have desktops that provide quite some eye-candy in their default configurations. Obviously some people change their themes to reduce the amount of eye-candy (others probably chose themes that offer even more eye-candy). But most people seem to be quite happy with their desktops otherwise Microsoft, Apple, KDE and Gnome would probably chose different themes / defaults. On the other hand,Gnustep applications feature a more conservative grey Next look. Gnustep did not manage to attract many users / developers compared to KDE / Gnome even so they had a head start. Certainly it is oversimplified to say that is just because of the Look Feel. But don't you think that the old-fashined Next Look is at least part of the problem? Have anyone here using GTK or Qt applications ever actually built these from scratch? I would assume no, because the idea of an easy install always comes up. I've personally next built Qt, but have done GTK. As a former KDE developer I have installed Qt / KDE from scratch. I didn't have any major problems doing it. Simple put, it's hell! You have 15 dependencies you need to satisfy before GTK even configures without an error, and another 10 dependencies to get decent support for everything you want ( http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/x/gtk2.html everything in Required + their dependencies). Then, after you're all done with that you still end up with a dull and grey look... so you go out and install the clearlooks theme engine. How is that any easier than building GNUstep? I can truthly say, it's not. I still say we need distribution Building KDE and Gnome is probably not easier then building gnustep. But most people do not have to do that, they just install the packages provided by their distros. And even as a KDE developer, you usually do not have to compile Qt yourself, just install libs + headers provided by your distro. On top of all that, GNUstep has a serious identity crisis. It's such a far departure from the usual Gnome/KDE/Windows desktop metaphore. So you end up with the problem that most people expect you provide at least a half working desktop in order to feel comfortable, but that's not GNUstep's goal, it's just a development environment. You can see that littered all And that is exactly the problem. GNUstep's goal is to provide a development environment, but the applications developed with it look foreign and out of place in KDE / Gnome and Windows. I don't know about MacOS X, but on MacOS X most people will probably use Cocoa anyway. In my opinion GNUstep as a development environment was/is a failure because it did not attract many developers / users.I don't see this changing by just improving gnustep-base or gnustep-gui. I think the only way to change this is to change the direction of the project. over Michael's post, he's trying to compare GNUstep with KDE and Gnome instead of with Qt and GTK (+ GLib and GDK). Etoile is definitly working to bridge that gap, but even so it's not easy to get it. I personally do not build all of Etoile because it's just simply too much work. I would not use Gnome if I had to build it everytime either. Most people do not have to build their desktop environments. They don't care how many dependencies KDE or GNOME has and how difficult it is to build them. If I want to write a cool new application for KDE, I just install KDE, all necessary headers and start developing my application. The exception are core developers that work on deskop components, but even they do not have to rebuild the whole desktop all the time. Here I agree with one of the messages that was posted before on this thread. GNUstep needs to stop chasing butterflies. GNUstep barely has full 10.3 compatibility, yet there already are 10.5 features in. In my opinion, and that's all it is since there's not much I can do to help in this aspect, GNUstep needs to focus on finishing full compability with one version of OS X before moving to the next. Pick one, and stick with it until you're at least 90% finished before moving to the next. I'm
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Michael Thaler michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de wrote: Hi, The gray and dull has nothing to do with it but, rather, the lack of glitter. I happen to work for a big company and while we use PCs with Windows XP (using it's default theme), the tools made specifically for us use the old Win NT look from the mid 90's. In fact one monitoring tool remotely running on some UNIX system and it's made with Motif. I've never seen any professional use glittery interfaces, they go for more neutral looking ones. I work for a company that develops software for the German Space Operation Center. They use Linux with KDE and Windows XP in all their control rooms. Why should something like Expose, window shadows or animations or transparancy make a user interface less useable? It can certainly make it less useable if overused, but it can also make it more useable when used at the right places. No argument there, everyone has different taste. So this is a case, in my own opinion, to favour skins in GNUstep as done via Chameleon for instance. I doubt that this is a solution. I doubt it is possible to make KDE or GNOME look like Snow Leopard. There was the Baghira theme which did quite some hackish things but even with Baghira the look and feel of KDE was not really similar to MacOS X. I once created a style for Chameleon (a KDE3 plastik style). At that time it was bitmap based and I doubt that it is possible to create a style that even resembles Snow Leopard. I don't say that gnustep should adopt Snow Leopard's Look Feel. But I think gnustep should adopt a more modern default Look Feel that is more familiar to people coming from Windows, KDE, Gnome or MacOS X. My former institute used KDE as desktop. But people usually worked with Mathematica or MatLab. If we did coding it was mostly low-level numerical stuff in Fortran, C or C++. I doubt that it is a good idea to target researchers with gnustep. What advantage would gnustep give them? No less than the ones you mentioned, and more considering GNUstep is way more advanced in terms of usability and consistency. NeXTSTEP was used at universities back in the 90's because it was way better then other systems. But the world changed, Windows / Linux with KDE or GNOME is good enough for people today. Developing applications with ObjC/gnustep might be easier / more convenient then developing applications with say C++/Qt, but it is not a fundamental improvement. Except I wasn't talking about code development with objc, I was talking about making apps that are far more usable without necessarily doing much more work to achieve this goal. The fact that those other systems you mentioned are good enough is because people don't know any better. They don't have as much information on alternative GUIs. Apple's is known, but not well known. And both Gnome and KDE are basically Windows clones (interface-wise) And back in the 90's Windows was not as dominant as it is today. Today most people are familar with the Windows GUI (even scientists / researchers) and it is always hard to get used to something new. gnustep Look Feel is radically different from what people are used and I guess most people prefer toolkits that enables them to write applications that has a Look Feel people are used to. This is bullshit. The fact that the world has changed and new things are hard to get out the door is just your own point of view. Getting people to embrace a new concept as GNUstep just depends on how you do it and how much work you're willing to put into it. That being said, The whole NeXT interface was built to be as usable as possible, and one of it's well known advantages is that it's easy to learn. behind some other compilers. As for GC, do you REALLY want that? I think it's way overrated. It tends to encourage bad programming practices, and usually kills performance. Yes. I have to code Java / .Net at work and I think GC is one of the things I like about Java and .Net. I know you can still have memory leaks, but GC allows me to think about the problem I want to solve without having to think about allocating / freeing memory all the time. Newever versions of the JVM include stack allocation and the garbage first collector, I don't think you'll have any performance problems with that. Michael I don't use Java or .NET, but the one person I know who uses Java hates it for lousy performance. And as much as a holy grail as it seems GC is still wrong for objc (even if it fits well with Java) because it has no primitive to dynamically allocate blocks of memory in the first place, it's done through standard library calls. If you're going to have an automatic deallocation mechanism, then you should have an automatic allocation one as well. -- Besos, abrazos, confeti y aplausos. Jamie Ramone El Vikingo ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list
Re: GNUmakfiles - sources must be in project's root?
On 26 Aug 2009, at 11:31, Juergen Lorenz Simon wrote: Hi, I'm trying to shoehorn GNUstep onto an existing project. During the creation of the GNUstep makefile (originally I had the luxury of cmake), I found I could not add sources like this: foo_OBJC_FILES = src/App/main.mm \ src/App/Protocol.mm \ ... The result in calling make -f GNUmakefile is: This is gnustep-make 2.2.0. Type 'make print-gnustep-make-help' for help. Making all for objc_program foo... make[2]: *** No rule to make target `obj/src/App/main.mm', needed by `obj/foo'. Stop. The question is: how do I add sourcefiles, which are organized in several subdirectories, to the GNUmakefile without having to create subprojects or reorganize the project layout? I perused the GNUstep module and application sources, I can't seem to find example. Interesting ... I implemented support for it in gnustep-make (trunk). It now works for me. Please try again if you have a chance. :-) Thanks ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Hi, Except I wasn't talking about code development with objc, I was talking about making apps that are far more usable without necessarily doing much more work to achieve this goal. The fact that those other First of all, applications written by scientists / researchers are usually not written to be useable, but to solve a specific problem. Second, useable is quite subjective. I doubt that a GNUstep application is more useable for anyone having 10 years of experience with Windows-like user interfaces. systems you mentioned are good enough is because people don't know any better. They don't have as much information on alternative GUIs. Apple's is known, but not well known. And both Gnome and KDE are basically Windows clones (interface-wise) Sorry, I really detest this elitist view. Do you have any case studies that Nextstep/Openstep is more useable then say Snow Leopard. I doubt it. This is bullshit. The fact that the world has changed and new things are hard to get out the door is just your own point of view. Getting people to embrace a new concept as GNUstep just depends on how you do it and how much work you're willing to put into it. That being said, The whole NeXT interface was built to be as usable as possible, and one of it's well known advantages is that it's easy to learn. Well, I am quite sure people at Microsoft will tell you the Windows interface was build to be as useable as possible. If you ask someone at Apple they will tell you there user interface is designed to be useable and the GNOME people will tell you all about their great usability even if you don't ask them. And if you think it is bullshit that it is hard to get new things out of the door, why did GNUstep not attract users / developers? Why are about 98% of the desktop systems worldwide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems) using a Windows-like user interface? I don't use Java or .NET, but the one person I know who uses Java hates it for lousy performance. And as much as a holy grail as it Have a look at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=alllang=allbox=1. I know this is not a realistic benchmark, but Java is not as bad as people (espacially people that never used Java) claim. I guess, it is probably best for me to stay with KDE and MacOS X because I don't share this elitist attitude that Nextstep/Openstep is the best GUI and people just don't use it because they don't know it. I for one know Nextstep/Openstep, I even have an old Gecko with Nextstep but I still prefer something more modern looking. KDE seems more user oriented. From my experience they want to create something the user wants to use and not something they think the user has to use to increase productivity. In my opinion OSS products should be fun to work on / with. But I am fine with your attitude as well, as long as you don't force it on me. Michael ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Terminal.app and fonts
Pablo Giménez schrieb: More info about this problem, I found this in the config.log: /usr/include/X11/Xft/Xft.h:42:10: error: #include expects FILENAME or FILENAME [deleted stuff] Seems that this configure doesn't like my Xft.h, any way to solve this? I looked into my own Xft.h and I expect that the following lines are causing your problem: #include ft2build.h #include FT_FREETYPE_H Freetype 2 uses some include magic to sort out its own path. The important bit is that the file ft2build.h must be in he standard include path and have all the right settings in it. I bet that this is broken for you. Fred ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Michael Thaler michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de wrote: Hi, Except I wasn't talking about code development with objc, I was talking about making apps that are far more usable without necessarily doing much more work to achieve this goal. The fact that those other First of all, applications written by scientists / researchers are usually not written to be useable, but to solve a specific problem. Second, useable is quite subjective. I doubt that a GNUstep application is more useable for anyone having 10 years of experience with Windows-like user interfaces. I didn't say anything about scientists, but users in general. And usability may be subjective, but not that much. Just google Jakob Nielsen. Interface engineering exists since Macintosh does. systems you mentioned are good enough is because people don't know any better. They don't have as much information on alternative GUIs. Apple's is known, but not well known. And both Gnome and KDE are basically Windows clones (interface-wise) Sorry, I really detest this elitist view. Do you have any case studies that Nextstep/Openstep is more useable then say Snow Leopard. I doubt it. I wasn't being elitist, just pointing out a fact: not many people know alternative GUIs. This comes from Windows having such a large portion of the desktop market. And Those who use a GNU/Linux system usually have a KDE or Gnome interface which look remarkably like Windows. Thus people seem to be accustom to that type of interface because that's all they really know. This is bullshit. The fact that the world has changed and new things are hard to get out the door is just your own point of view. Getting people to embrace a new concept as GNUstep just depends on how you do it and how much work you're willing to put into it. That being said, The whole NeXT interface was built to be as usable as possible, and one of it's well known advantages is that it's easy to learn. Well, I am quite sure people at Microsoft will tell you the Windows interface was build to be as useable as possible. If you ask someone at Apple they will tell you there user interface is designed to be useable and the GNOME people will tell you all about their great usability even if you don't ask them. Get real, Windows was built to compete with Macintosh. GNOME wasn't BUILT to be as usable as possible, but has improved over the years. Of all the desktops out there, Apple is the only one that actually does usability research, just about everyone else works on assumptions. And if you think it is bullshit that it is hard to get new things out of the door, why did GNUstep not attract users / developers? Why are about 98% of the desktop systems worldwide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems) using a Windows-like user interface? Because, like I said, it depends greatly on how you present your work and how much work you put into marketing it. This topic pops up over and over again, but no big effort has come out of this. I don't use Java or .NET, but the one person I know who uses Java hates it for lousy performance. And as much as a holy grail as it Have a look at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=alllang=allbox=1. I know this is not a realistic benchmark, but Java is not as bad as people (espacially people that never used Java) claim. I guess, it is probably best for me to stay with KDE and MacOS X because I don't share this elitist attitude that Nextstep/Openstep is the best GUI and people just don't use it because they don't know it. I for one know Nextstep/Openstep, I even have an old Gecko with Nextstep but I still prefer something more modern looking. KDE seems more user oriented. From my experience they want to create something the user wants to use and not something they think the user has to use to increase productivity. In my opinion OSS products should be fun to work on / with. But I am fine with your attitude as well, as long as you don't force it on me. Which I wasn't. I wasn't being elitist either (read above). I still stand by my claim: once enough people are made aware of GNUstep some will choose it, some won't, but it won't be automatically rejected on grounds of being out of fashion or hard to use or too different from Windows or any of the usual excuses used by some to dismiss it. And let's be fair, no one in the GNUstep community is ever elitist (zealous maybe). Have you ever heard complaints from software developers about the Mac crowd? You'd think they're all primadonnas who feel they're entitled to to the best software there is by virtue of being a Mac user. I've never encountered that with GNUsteppers so far. So if you want to stay with Mac, go ahead. If you want to go with GNUstep you're welcome in the community. Not to get back to the previous argument but...ahem: I, for one. Remember, NeXT never achieved a significant market share so quite
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
I think this discussion is out of his goal. We could discuss days about what is better, and we will not reach an agreement. Everyone will have their opinions and will always be differences. I think the goal is to work together on short-term goals, so the only thing needed is to determine those objectives. I think these are: 1) Improving the website: With sections for new users, advanced users, screenshots with different themes and different desktops (especially GNOME and KDE) and how to obtain these themes or install these (including Camaelon). And information for users and packagers. Also screenshots of apps running on other desktops. 2) More documents for new users, which we assume do not know Cocoa. (We need users in other environments) 3) Themes: Well, there are currently people working on it. 4) Improve Project Center Of course there are other long-term goals. But I think the above are the main short term. ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Hi, first of all I am sorry that I spammed the list. Apparently I have a strong opinion about the matter, but I might have offended people that work hard on GNUstep and it might have been better to just shut up because my opinion doesn't really matter anyway because I never contributed anything to GNUstep (well, I once started creating a KDE style for Cameleon, but I never finished it and I can't remember if I actually made it publicly available). So this will be the last mail on this subject from me. I didn't say anything about scientists, but users in general. And usability may be subjective, but not that much. Just google Jakob Nielsen. Interface engineering exists since Macintosh does. The original poster did. I wasn't being elitist, just pointing out a fact: not many people know alternative GUIs. This comes from Windows having such a large portion Are you sure? At least most people my age probably used something like GEOS, the Amiga Workbench, GEM on the Atari ST, RISC OS desktop, CDE, BeOS or something else. At least I did use some of them including NeXTSTEP. But apparently most people seem to be happy with Windows-like interfaces nowadays, otherwise there would be more alternate desktop environments, especially on Linux and other open source operating systems. Get real, Windows was built to compete with Macintosh. GNOME wasn't BUILT to be as usable as possible, but has improved over the years. Of all the desktops out there, Apple is the only one that actually does usability research, just about everyone else works on assumptions. That is definitivly not true, Here is are some links to GNOME usability studies: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/report_main.html http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/usertesting.html There is also a GNOME usability project: http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject Here is a Microsoft usability report: http://www.microsoft.com/Usability/default.mspx Here is a link to the Microsoft user research page: http://www.microsoft.com/userresearch/default.mspx Because, like I said, it depends greatly on how you present your work and how much work you put into marketing it. This topic pops up over and over again, but no big effort has come out of this. GNUstep had fifteen years to present GNUstep as a development environment to developers / users. There have been articles in linux magazines, there have been articles on slashdot / osnews and other major software news websites. In my opinion GNUstep as a software development environment failed because it did not attract many developers / users.I don't think marketing will solve this because in my opinion it is basically useless to develop applications using the GNUstep development environment because they do not integrate with KDE nor GNOME nor Windows and there is no real GNUstep desktop environment (but I am quite happy about Etoile). I don't think marketing will change any of that. I think the only way to change that is to change the direction of the project (but as I said above, this is my personal opinion and I do not want to force it on anybody. If people prefer GNUstep the way it is, it is fine with me, there are enough alternatives). Which I wasn't. I wasn't being elitist either (read above). I still stand by my claim: once enough people are made aware of GNUstep some will choose it, some won't, but it won't be automatically rejected on grounds of being out of fashion or hard to use or too different from Windows or any of the usual excuses used by some to dismiss it. Maybe your claim that once enough people are made aware of GNUstep some will choose it is flawed? GNUstep is there for about fifteen years, but apparently most people seem to prefer KDE or GNOME, even open source developers who read slashdot and OSNews and almost certainly heard about GNUstep (I remember some stories about GNUstep on slashdot and OSNews). Also the advent of MacOS X did not really help GNUstep (as far as I know). I know a lot of Linux users who like open source and own MacBooks (including me). Wouldn't it be natural for them to use gnustep which is quite similar to Cocoa? If they don't use it, wouldn't it be interesting why they don't use it, even so it seems a natural fit. I, for one, like the Openstep / GNUstep / Cocoa API but I do not like how GNUstep applications look and that GNUstep applications do not integrate with any existing desktop on Linux and that there is no GNUstep desktop environment. Do you think it is farfetched that I am not the only one who thinks like this? Not to get back to the previous argument but...ahem: I, for one. Remember, NeXT never achieved a significant market share so quite naturally, not many people know about it. Well, Windows did and in this respect Microsoft did much better then NeXT (and Apple and all the others). Windows is far from the best desktop environment, but apparently it was good enough for most people,
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Hi, I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing I did at work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic mode because I prefer Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look compared to Aero. On the other hand, I think Snow Leopard looks quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look sort of ok. But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it is a masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something using gnustep, the old-fashened Look Feel kills my motivation because I think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am actually a former KDE developer). Well, what you write here actually proves my point. The first thing I do on XP or Vista is to reset to Windows classic. Windows classic is then - barring the icons of XP or Vista - pretty much like WIndows 2000 indeed. And the controls, widgets, buttons are those of NT4 or 95/98. But guess what? In my opinion Microsoft really copied the NeXT look and adapted it to the Windows 3.1 style. I can tell you since I develop the WinClassic theme. SOmetimes i have difficulties recognizing if I themend an Item or not or int he images folder the images really look close together. SUre there are differences, there are different controls, but that is not the point. If you swithc back to classic, you are essentially stating you like the old look you despise. THe difference is in many details of polish, different fonts and especially more uniform Icons. Also, you notice the incompleteness of several applications. When Applications have a more complete feature-set, are well implemented (I think of Gorm or GNUMail for example) everything is better. Riccardo ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Hi, In my opinion GNUstep has to stop this it's just a development environment thing and develop a desktop environment where GNUstep applications do not look totaly out of place. GNUstep probably can't compete with KDE or GNOME but why shouldn't it be possible to compete with something like XFCE or Equinox or one of the other smaller OSS desktop environments. I think GNUstep needs to be more attractive to KDE / GNOME / MacOS X. In my opinion these are the people most likely to use GNUstep and if GNUstep attracts more users it will automatically get more developers. Well, although I would not write that, I think it is about correct. I got angry and almost livid when Gregory started pointing out that. We are a development environment. And a good one. But we are not just that. On the other hand, GNUstep is not a Desktop Environment (I like it to call it a Workspace). It should never be. Other projects can fill that gap building up on GNUstep. Not by a total change the GNUstep Application Project shortens to GAP. As you compare GTK and GNOME or GTK and XCFEl, that is gnustep. GNUstep is a bit more than just GTK, it has also the developer tools and some reference applications like SystemPreferences and GWorkspace, which are totally optional! SO you can use GNUstep with Etoile and get complete Desktop Environment. On the other hand, GAP tries about the same. But since some applications like the windowmanager exist (WindowMaker) it leverages on them (also to retain easy compatibility with other X11 apps you currently use a lot but will always, in a lesser degree, need to use: be it a Browser, an Office Suite or just Skye). GNUstep + Windowmaker + GAP I do not exactly, other people can stand up, but the Backbone project has about the same idea. Of course each project has different philosphies, exaclty like XFce is different from GNOME. It also means that you can run a standard GNustep applicaiton inside Etoile. Riccardo ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Michael Thaler wrote: GNUstep had fifteen years to present GNUstep as a development environment to developers / users. There have been articles in linux magazines, there have been articles on slashdot / osnews and other major software news websites. In my opinion GNUstep as a software development environment failed because it did not attract many developers / users.I don't think marketing will solve this because in my opinion it is basically useless to develop applications using the GNUstep development environment because they do not integrate with KDE nor GNOME nor Windows and there is no real GNUstep desktop environment (but I am quite happy about Etoile). I don't think marketing will change any of that. I think the only way to change that is to change the direction of the project (but as I said above, this is my personal opinion and I do not want to force it on anybody. If people prefer GNUstep the way it is, it is fine with me, there are enough alternatives). I think you are definitely right in that what keeps developers from choosing GNUstep for their work is that applications do not integrate well with other desktop environments. This is not news, however, and I'm not sure what you mean by changing the direction of the project. What should be done besides the things Gregory listed in his 2007 visions, and backed up as still valid for 2009? http://heronsperch.blogspot.com/2006/12/plans-for-change.html http://heronsperch.blogspot.com/2008/12/gnustep-in-year-2009-look-back-and-look.html -Truls ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
In my opinion GNUstep has to stop this it's just a development environment thing and develop a desktop environment where GNUstep applications do not look totaly out of place. GNUstep probably can't compete with KDE or GNOME but why shouldn't it be possible to compete with something like XFCE or Equinox or one of the other smaller OSS desktop environments. I think GNUstep needs to be more attractive to KDE / GNOME / MacOS X. In my opinion these are the people most likely to use GNUstep and if GNUstep attracts more users it will automatically get more developers. Well, although I would not write that, I think it is about correct. I got angry and almost livid when Gregory started pointing out that. We are a development environment. And a good one. But we are not just that. On the other hand, GNUstep is not a Desktop Environment (I like it to call it a Workspace). It should never be. Other projects can fill that gap building up on GNUstep. Not by a total change the GNUstep Application Project shortens to GAP. As you compare GTK and GNOME or GTK and XCFEl, that is gnustep. GNUstep is a bit more than just GTK, it has also the developer tools and some reference applications like SystemPreferences and GWorkspace, which are totally optional! SO you can use GNUstep with Etoile and get complete Desktop Environment. On the other hand, GAP tries about the same. But since some applications like the windowmanager exist (WindowMaker) it leverages on them (also to retain easy compatibility with other X11 apps you currently use a lot but will always, in a lesser degree, need to use: be it a Browser, an Office Suite or just Skye). GNUstep + Windowmaker + GAP I do not exactly, other people can stand up, but the Backbone project has about the same idea. Of course each project has different philosphies, exaclty like XFce is different from GNOME. It also means that you can run a standard GNustep applicaiton inside Etoile. Riccardo If I could draw one conclusion on behalf of this thread, it is that GNUstep would really benefit from a second, less radical, desktop environment besides Etoile. A project that integrates GWorkspace, WindowMaker, and GAP applications and says We're a polished GNUstep- based desktop!, and can be installed with a single package yielding a desktop users can choose in their login screen. I tried setting up such an environment myself on an Ubuntu 9.10 beta VM image last week, installing GWorkspace, WindowMaker, and a handful of GNUstep applications. The problem was that I had to set up the environment myself. WindowMaker was installed as a desktop choice, but I had to manually start GWorkspace. By default, (I believe Zhang Weiwu also mentioned this a few months ago) you get two docks - one from WindowMaker and one from GWorkspace. I couldn't find a way of launching applications other than using the Run command in GWorkspace. I am focused on Etoile, but would still love to see someone start this kind of project, whether it involves continuing Backbone, expanding GAP in to a desktop, or choosing a new project name. In any case, I think it would be healthy for the whole GNUstep community. Cheers, Eric ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Am 11.10.2009 um 00:51 schrieb Riccardo Mottola: Hi, I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing I did at work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic mode because I prefer Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look compared to Aero. On the other hand, I think Snow Leopard looks quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look sort of ok. But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it is a masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something using gnustep, the old-fashened Look Feel kills my motivation because I think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am actually a former KDE developer). Well, what you write here actually proves my point. The first thing I do on XP or Vista is to reset to Windows classic. Windows classic is then - barring the icons of XP or Vista - pretty much like WIndows 2000 indeed. And the controls, widgets, buttons are those of NT4 or 95/98. But guess what? In my opinion Microsoft really copied the NeXT look and adapted it to the Windows 3.1 style. I can tell you since I develop the WinClassic theme. SOmetimes i have difficulties recognizing if I themend an Item or not or int he images folder the images really look close together. SUre there are differences, there are different controls, but that is not the point. If you swithc back to classic, you are essentially stating you like the old look you despise. Riccardo, nobody is going to take away the classic OPENSTEP look from you. It will always be there as a theme - even if this will not be the default one. On the other hand I don't understand your lobbying for the classic look. People have their own taste, you can't force something onto them - you yourself strongly preferring the classic look should know this best. Arguments don't help here, taste is not something to discuss as they say (Über Geschmack lässt sich nicht streiten in german). And in our case a discussion about a default theme has no point since GNUstep aims to be a development environment as you state yourself: Hi, In my opinion GNUstep has to stop this it's just a development environment thing and develop a desktop environment where GNUstep applications do not look totaly out of place. GNUstep probably can't compete with KDE or GNOME but why shouldn't it be possible to compete with something like XFCE or Equinox or one of the other smaller OSS desktop environments. I think GNUstep needs to be more attractive to KDE / GNOME / MacOS X. In my opinion these are the people most likely to use GNUstep and if GNUstep attracts more users it will automatically get more developers. Well, although I would not write that, I think it is about correct. I got angry and almost livid when Gregory started pointing out that. We are a development environment. And a good one. But we are not just that. On the other hand, GNUstep is not a Desktop Environment (I like it to call it a Workspace). It should never be. Other projects can fill that gap building up on GNUstep. Not by a total change the GNUstep Application Project shortens to GAP. And if we are a development environment our goal is to help developers to create their applications. Those applications could then run in any context, just as the developers of that application envisions. This naturally leads to themability. Developers naturally want their applications to fit in. If you don't believe this look at Qt. They developed themes that fit in on all platforms they support (even if this is not by any means perfect). Themability is a must for a self respecting development environment nowadays. So we need GNOME, KDE and Windows themes. Just to be able to fit in there. regards, Lars ___ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
