Re: Global Defaults / look and feel

[Nicola Pero]

> As for the colour pickers, we just don't have any included in the
> GNUstep code. I did write a few simple colour pickers some 16 months
> ago, but they had a horrible user interface, as I did not manage to get
> the split view to work correctly. I am still hoping that Nicola, who has
> the code since than, will find some time to polish this code. You really
> would not want to work with the current interface. You could try to
> lobby for this, if a few hundred GNUstep users would ask Nicola for
> colour pickers, I am sure they would make his top priority.

I know I won't have time for this in the next future - so I'm absolutely
happy with someone else working on it :-)

Actually, contributions for this are encouraged and I personally think it
would be quite an exciting piece of code to write - and I regret I don't
have time to do it :-( but it's pointless of me to keep a lock on this
project if I don't have time to do it - I'd really like to see someone
else write them.

What is required is taking some good NeXTstep screenshots of the NeXTstep
color panel, and drawing and laying out all the widgets in the color panel
so that it looks the same (maniacal love of NeXTstep look&feel to the
pixel appreciated) and nice, resizes correctly, and hopefully also is
enough intelligent to lay things down correctly when the size of labels
change (because the panel is translated into another language).  But you
can do without that at a first try.

I recommend hardcoding all code to layout widgets (or using [hv]boxes),
and not using IB-generated code.  The code must of course be suitable to
be included into gnustep-gui - that includes adherence to the coding style
used in gnustep-gui, and copyright assignment to the FSF.

As you say, you have already written the main logic behind the colour
pickers ... it's just the widget layout which are missing.

I will still try to help with the code, review the results, and do my best
to help get good quality software as a result.

Please anybody interested in taking this job, let Adam Fedor and me know
for book-keeping purposes of who is working on who :-) and email Fred to
get the code to work on.  Or maybe Fred you could commit your unfinished
code to CVS, and everyone can start working from there.

If nobody else volunteers, I'll of course take up the job myself at some
point in the future.