Re: question about low availability of Mac OS X applications that has GnuStep edition

[Ivan Vučica]

2011/1/25 Banlu Kemiyatorn <object@gmail.com>

I personally believe that 3 ways to bring GNUstep to the mass are..
1) Make a large but stupid company to adopt it and flood a lot of
money into it. Ha! one almost did too bad they suddenly realized they
shouldn't do that in first place, at least not for now.
2) Win a platform. We for example must make GNUstep better than GTK+
on GNOME but in the end of day we will be just there, just like GNOME.
3) The easiest way, imo, is focusing on the functionalities, make a
killer desktop application that everybody would want to use. Something
that actually generate revenue. Giving people jobs, giving people real
profits. Like a Photoshop  or 3DS Max killer, or a real video editing
app, InDesign or Illustrator killer, just pick one. We all should
unite our efforts on a single or two apps. Then we will have our own
legs to stand on.

4) Just get people acquainted with it, not by having just superb APIs but superb user experience in the form of a desktop environment -- Etoile. Just pushing Etoile (or some other desktop environment) into mainstream distros and fixing crucial usability issues would mean a lot for promotion of GNUstep. Having a complete, functional environment with very easily accessible word processor (check?), email client (check!), and a browser (no-check) useable after punching in "apt-get install whatever-desktop" would do wonders. 

GTK did not become popular just because it's something people are comfortable working in; it became particularly popular after having a complete environment (GNOME), where people met GTK every day, became popular. QT rose to prominence because of KDE. Cocoa became popular because of OS X, not the other way around. UIKit is popular not just because it's simple to work with, but because iPhone is popular. Who would use Win32 APIs if Windows weren't popular?

-- 
Regards,

Ivan Vučica