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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...


From: Michael Thaler
Subject: Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 17:33:35 +0200
User-agent: KMail/1.12.2 (Linux/2.6.30-1-amd64; KDE/4.3.2; x86_64; ; )

Hi all,

> In my strong opinion our target audience could be:
> - NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP users who misses NS/OS look, feel and user experience  
> in general (I'm one of them);

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT: Sales of the NeXT computers were 
relatively limited, with estimates of about 50,000 units shipped in total.

OK, there is also OpenStep, so lets say there were about 100.000 
NeXTSTEP/Openstep users in total. How many of these people really miss the 
NS/OS look, feel and user experience?

I dont really know, but if it is 10% percent, it is about 10.000 Users.
Probably it is less then that. I don't think that it makes any sense to focus 
on this group.

> - technical people who loves WindowMaker;

I used to use WindowMaker a long time ago. But frankly WindowMaker is just 
outdated and looks dull. There are probably still people using WindowMaker, 
but how many?

> - researchers, students who can use GNUstep as basement for it's works.

There has been a version of Mathematica for Nextstep. There was the lighthouse 
sweet. There are basically no scientific applications for Gnustep. I did a Ph. 
D. in physics and I doubt very much that lots of researchers will be 
interested in gnustep, at least at its current state.

I know lots of physicists who own MacBooks (including me). They like MacOS X. 
But I really doubt that many of them would use MacOS X if it would look like 
NeXTSTEP.

> 2. Stop chasing MacOS functionality. Let's set our target to for example  
> MacOS 10.5 for a several years.
>     In other words - polish and finish current implementation.

I think gnustep should definitivly adopt improvments made by MacOS X, 
especially Objective C 2.0 and the garbage collector. There are several 
reasons for this:

First there are many open source applications for MacOS X which could be 
ported to gnustep. If gnustep does not adopt changes / improvements from MacOS 
X this will be even harden then it is today.

Second, there are many books for learning programming on the Mac, but there 
are none for gnustep. I think it makes gnustep much more attractive to new 
developers if there are useful books.

Third: noone wants to write cross-plattform applications (for Cocoa  and 
gnustep) if gnustep lacks many of the features of Cocoa.

> 6. Create working destop environment for developers at least. Some day I  
> realized that I'm working

I second that. As long as there is no desktop environment people can actually 
use, almost nobody will use gnustep applications. And without users it will be 
really hard to get new developers.

What stops me from using gnustep (etoile) as a desktop is that there is no 
browser. In my opinion gnustep / etoile  really needs a good browser using 
webkit or gecko (SimpleWebkit might be nice to work on but I don't think it 
will be good enough. Even khtml is not good enough for lots of people).

Michael





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