Re: General Design Guidelines for GNUstep and apps

[Ondrej Florian]

Hi Thomas,

I am afraid creating modern, OSX-like desktop would require very different 
approach than GSDE is taking. 
Using Wayland, process separation and something like D-bus for IPC for example. 

What makes GSDE cool is its simplicity. All of its consistency and power comes 
from the GNUstep foundation (e.g. services, NSNotifications, global key 
shortcuts, steptalk, etc.). 

However, this is only possible because all apps are GNUstep apps (or wrappers).
I did experiment with bridging GTK with GNUstep to make "porting" apps to GSDE 
easier,
but considering one has to remap all keys, menus, dialog boxes to make it all 
work and look the same as GSDE,
it is really not worth the effort.

"Normal" world is much, much more complex.
There is a reason why GNOME, KDE or even XFSE are such beasts.
There are many edge cases that these desktop environments must take into 
cosideration.
Linux Desktop is not easy problem to solve.

Thanks,
Ondrej

On 2024-04-03 10:57:00 +0200 Thomas <t.heckert@gmx.de> wrote:

> Hi Ondrej,
> 
> I would very very appriciate if these menus "hide others", "show all" or 
> "quit“ and so on would stay and work GSDE wide in a uniform way :-).
> 
> In my opinion you addressing one main reason for the tiny userbase GNUstep 
> has. There is noch easy to use, comfortable home (a fine Desktop 
> environment).
> You remember what Jobs said about OS X Aqua? „You want to lick it…“ ;-).
> As an old OS X user who want to leave Apples hardware and has to use M$ at 
> work (including swearing) I would like to have things that work on OS X 
> (menus) similar on GNUstep (GSDE)…
> as also NEXTstep has some changes on the way to OS X ;-).
> Why not adapt the good things?
> Currently I often change to one of the not so bad LINUX Desktops for instance 
> XFSE or so to do things easier as GSDE is not yet complete …..
> 
> But I don’t understand why GWorkspace menu calls do not work. I thought 
> that GWorkspace only interact with wmaker and these calls are specified?
> 
> Best regards
> 
> Thomas
> 
>> Am 02.04.2024 um 23:25 schrieb Ondrej Florian <onflapp@yahoo.com>:
> 
>> Hi Thomas,
> 
>> As GNUstep is platform independent, there is no specific design guideline.
>> Many applications will use menu items, shortcut keys etc. that fit 
>> particular platform (Windows / OS X or Linux)
>> GNUmail or PikoPixel is good example of that.
> 
>> GSDE and Nextspace follow Next/OpenStep design guideline.
>> However, this means an application needs to be tweaked for each 
>> platform/environment either by creating dedicate gorm files or 
>> programmatically.
>> Integration and consistency is one of the reasons why GSDE forked many 
>> common GNUstep applications.
>> GWorkspace.app has not been forked (yet) that's why it still has menus like 
>> "hide other", "show all" or "quit" which do not really do anything useful 
>> in GSDE.
> 
>> I am experimenting with using StepTalk scripts to modify UI to fit GSDE to 
>> avoid forking the code itself but it has its limits.
> 
>> ---
>> As for using ProjectCenter to build source code.
>> I would like to end up with *all* applications in GSDE being directly 
>> build-able from ProjectCenter but that will require a lot of additional 
>> work as many makefiles will have to be rewritten.
> 
>> ...one step at a time ;-)
> 
>> Ondrej
> 
>> On 2024-03-28 10:02:22 +0100 Thomas <t.heckert@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>>> Hello,
> 
>>> as I play around with GSDE I noticed that there are some differences 
>>> between the usage of the apps.
> 
>>> Does a Design Guideline for GNUstep exists (as Apple has(d))?
> 
>>> So at macos every app from the Finder to the smallest app has the 
>>> (standard) menue points:  hide, hide others, show all.
>>> Here with GNUstep only GWorkspace has this menue entries and by the way on 
>>> my HP prodesk 400 G3 mini with GSDE on Debian hide others doesn´t work, 
>>> it hides GWorkspace itself, the opposite behavior I awaited.
> 
>>> Other (maybe stupid) Question from a newbe: I copied for instance from 
>>> github the zip files from Textedit to my computer to find out wether I can 
>>> open and learn to program the source with Projectcenter and Gorm but I 
>>> can´t find a projectfile like in Xcode.
>>> Do I have to use git how to begin programming existing projects?  Hints 
>>> welcome. :-)
> 
> 
>>> Best regards and Happy Easter!
> 
>>> Thomas
> 
> 
>