Re: "Books" to be ported to GNUstep

[Fred Kiefer]

Christopher Culver wrote:
> Maybe you remember that last summer I was interested in doing a library 
> management project. This got sidetracked, though I feel the lack of such 
> a program everytime I look at my bookshelves. However, I've contacted 
> the developer of Books (http://books.aetherial.net/) about porting his 
> mature program to GNUstep. I've heard that he uses Panther things that 
> GNUstep doesn't have yet (NSToolbar support, etc), but he plans on doing 
> a Jaguar backport. He says he's really excited about the possibility of 
> a GNUstep port.
>
> I would really like having this app ported to GNUstep. It would be a 
> great boost to GS, since *nix in general doesn't have anything like 
> this. However, I'm very much a novice, Charmap the height of my skill. 
> I'd be happy to learn more along the way, but I really hope that I can 
> depend on other GNUsteppers to help out, especially people who have OS X 
> experience and can tell Cocoa from Carbon.

I had a look at Books source code and all I did see was Cocoa. Although 
there is a lot more code, than I would like to read at the moment, I 
wont expect any Carbon in it. There is some CoreFoundation code, eg in 
the XMLReader and of course there are a lot of new classes that GNUstep 
is still missing. Not only from AppKit (eg NSSearchFieldCell), also 
Foundation classes as NSIndexedSet. They also use a huge (and I mean 
huge) NIB file, which will cause some pain to port it to GNUstep. But I 
just decided to make this the test application for my NIB loading 
project. Last night I already extended the binary property list loading 
code to handle this format and next week I will look into the few 
remaining problems. Still somebody is needed that implements all the 
missing classes.