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Re: General Design Guidelines for GNUstep and apps


From: Thomas
Subject: Re: General Design Guidelines for GNUstep and apps
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2024 09:07:36 +0200

Hi Ondrej,

I think we shouldn´t begin this X11-Wayland „discussion“/fight LINUX-Users are practising for years meanwhile.
Most of these pseudomodern Blingbling ist only useless Eyecandy. With themes (Rik?) and a compositor (hopefully stable) we will get with less effort good results.
Then after there will be a more attractive package for a larger userbase we can begin to think over further steps.
First I think  being more representive with an easy package to the normal user would bring more results.
So it also would avoid such vi-hereos as in 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3dZoTl3aic

who can hack on the keyboard for 24 hours 7 days a week without any usefull result merely consuming energy and increasing internet traffic… ;-)

As Ricardo mentioned could you test wether this strange menu behavior is caused by GDSE please or is there another reason?

Thanks

Thomas

  

Am 04.04.2024 um 00:37 schrieb Ondrej Florian <onflapp@yahoo.com>:

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






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