Heron's Perch

Banning software patents....

2011-07-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

I have been fighting against software patents for years. It's upsetting to see things like this happening:

http://www.widgetpress.com/defense

And this:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/07/16/1152252/UK-Developers-Quit-US-App-Store-Over-Patent-Fears

Doesn't the US realize that we are killing our software industry by doing this? You can't even say that big business believes in software patents anymore since large companies in the US are now also turning against them.

The EU and the UK both rejected software patents for a very good reason. Because they realized that abstract ideas should not be patentable. Software is fundamentally reducible to mathematical algorithms. It is incremental in it's nature and, many times, there is only one way to do things. For all of these reasons and many more.

Most companies today, especially small ones, are forced to patent certain things they do because they need to maintain a patent portfolio. They do this to defend themselves. So, like nuclear weapons, patents proliferate in a sort of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) approach.

As an incentive to reform I would like to see the USPTO take a dose of what it is creating. The USPTO should be required to pay a fine for every patent which is found invalid with the money going towards a fund to pay restitution to those who've lost money due to the USPTO's negligence. In addition, it should be an option to sue the USPTO for issuance of a bad patent by either the party holding the patent or the party which was sued due to the issuance of the patent or both.

Ultimately, it is the USPTO putting these weapons of mass destruction in everyone's hands. They should be forced to reap what they've sown.

Building clang for use with GNUstep

2011-07-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

1) Build using the instructions here: http://clang.llvm.org/get_started.html

2) Once that's done, download the latest version of Hans Boehm's garbage collector here: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/

3) Untar, Build and install boehm-gc.... it should be gc-7.1.tar.gz
build it with clang like so:
./configure CC=clang LD=gcc && make CC=clang LD=gcc
make install
NOTE: You only need to do step 2 & 3 if you want garbage collection, if not you can skip it.

4) Build gnustep-make like so and install it:

./configure CC=clang LD=gcc && make CC=clang LD=gcc

make install

5) Build libobj2 and install it:

make CC=clang CXX=clang++ LD=gcc

make install

6) Build base, gui and back and install them:

./configure CC=clang CXX=clang++ LD=gcc && make CC=clang CXX=clang++ LD=gcc messages=yes

. /usr/GNUstep/System/Library/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh && make GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DOMAIN=SYSTEM install

That should be all there is too it. Not much, but a few little details which might serve to make it enough of a pain to discourage some people.

Talk in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh) April 21, 2011 - Report

2011-06-16T07:46:00.000-07:00

I realize this is a little late, but I figured that I should post my impressions anyway. First I have to say I was honored when Mark Darymple invited me to come and talk at Cocoaheads in Pittsburgh. I tend to give talks off of the cuff since I don't usually do well sticking to a script and that's what I did at this meeting and it worked fairly well.

The reception of GNUstep was very positive and the members of the group were eager to learn. I got a lot of questions about the project including what we're planning to do with respect to an iOS compatibility layer and also what we're currently working on. I also did get a lot of complaints about how GNUstep looks, in general. I showed them the work that's being done on both Windows and GNOME to improve how GNUstep blends in with those environments using the new theming code. They seemed very impressed by that as well as by Bean.

I did a basic demo of how Gorm works as well as PC and showed them pbxbuild building a Mac OS X project.

Most of the members of the group knew about GNUstep, but didn't know it currently followed Cocoa and some had not followed it in a while since they assumed the project was no longer active. This is one of the many reasons why I am trying to do this talks. To make sure I spread the word that it is still out there and still kicking.

I sincerely thank the people of Cocoaheads, Pittsburgh for giving me the opportunity to come and talk. It was a distinct pleasure meeting each and every one of you. :)

How to build the GNOME theme...

2011-01-02T08:11:00.000-08:00

This article is in response to a request for instructions on how to build the theme...

Given that this is currently very experimental code I didn't think an article about how to use it was in order yet since it's not released, but it makes sense to do this nevertheless. :)

Here's how:

Get the code from SVN per the instructions at the gna.org project page. The URL for the SVN project page is https://gna.org/svn/?group=gnustep

You should be able to go to the GNUstep project and choose Source Code->Use Subversion and follow the instructions there. Once you check out, the code should be located at gnustep/modules/plugins/themes/GnomeTheme.

Make certain you have all of the necessary GNOME packages installed as well as their dev equivalents, these include (please let me know if I'm missing anything):

gtk-x11-2.0
gdk-x11-2.0
atk-1.0
pangoft2.1.0
gdk_pixbuf-2.0
pangocairo-1.0
gio-2.0
pango-1.0
gobject-2.0
gmodule-2.0
glib-2.0
gconf-2.0

Build GNUstep's core libraries... there are plenty of tutorials on how to do this.
You should then be able to build the GNOME theme and install it simply by doing:

make
make install (as root)

Once that's done, you can start using the theme in one of three ways:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain GSTheme GnomeTheme
open the Info panel of the app you want to test the theme with and choose the theme for the application there
open SystemPreferences and go to the Themes module and choose the theme from the list of themes available there.

Please let me know if there's anything I missed here or if any further information is needed. GC

Menu Separator goodness...

2010-12-29T09:26:00.000-08:00

Menu separators make a big difference. ;) I know this is a relatively minor change, but it looks excellent with the theme.

More GNOME Theme Improvements

2010-12-27T08:16:00.000-08:00

Bean running with the GNOME native theme

As you can see... I'm making some progress. I've corrected a number of problems with GNUstep's in window menu generation. It's now very close to what most other apps generate in GNOME.

I considered a few approaches, one was to leverage some of the code I wrote for the Windows theme to generate the menu from the menu structure and create a GtkMenu to attach to the Window... the issue with this approach was that it would have required the window to be a GtkWindow, which wasn't a good idea. The other approach I considered was to reparent the GNUstep created window into a GtkWindow which contains the GtkMenu. The issue with this was that it would have been impossible to switch back to another theme which doesn't use the GNOME widgets and GtkWindow.

The approach I settled on is a good middle ground. The changes fix a number of issues which were present in the code previously. Also, it gives more control to us regarding the look of the in-window menus.

My plans are to work out the remaining bugs with this and release it so that people can start playing with it. I will have more screenshots in the future as it becomes more mature. Feel free to comment on anything you think can be improved. :)

GNOME on GNUstep: First look

2010-12-22T09:38:00.000-08:00

Here is what it currently looks like:

As you can see, it's not perfect. The icon is still on the bottom left, the menu is still floating. I've made all of the changes necessary to get the GNOME theme working again. I've also refactored it so that it loads nicely from SystemPreferences, which the previous version didn't do.

Once I get the final details worked out, you should be able to run your GNUstep applications alongside GNOME applications without any problems and without them sticking out like a sore thumb.

Any comments are appreciated. I am trying to make GNUstep blend into GNOME as much as possible so that you can port your Cocoa apps to many different environments easily.

Sony SNAP using GNUstep as it's development environment...

2010-11-21T13:45:00.000-08:00

Sony SNAP is using GNUstep as it's development environment. They are, apparently, going to use it as the basis for an SDK they're developing to build software for their Consumer Electronics devices, such as TVs and etc.

Here is the link: http://snap.sonydeveloper.com/pages/develop/

We have been in touch with SONY about this and are very excited about the prospects. More soon. :)

GNUstep Is Not OpenStep...

2010-11-16T05:56:00.000-08:00

Hey guys. I thought I would make this blog post to make a point: GNUstep is not OpenStep. GNUstep is a Cocoa implementation and has been for quite some time. I'm concerned that every so often in books or on blogs I see "GNUstep is an OpenStep implementation for Linux." This statement is blatantly wrong in two different capacites: 1) GNUstep is Cocoa and 2) GNUstep works on Linux, Solaris, BSD, Windows, etc.

Let's also address a few other misconceptions. GNUstep has been used to port a number of applications to Windows and Linux without any issues. So when people say "GNUstep is incomplete" they, honestly, don't really know what they're talking about. In most cases, GNUstep will contain whatever you need and, if it's not there then, for goodness sake, do the thing that supposed to be done in Free Software... implement it and contribute the code to us.

I'm beginning to wonder why so many people have trouble with this very simple concept. Please, people, stop spreading misinformation about GNUstep. GNUstep is not OpenStep, OpenStep is a dead standard. GNUstep is [an attempt to implement a Free Software version of] Cocoa. While GNUstep does retain some of the OpenStep methods which are useful, it is a Cocoa implementation at this point in time and I'm really tired of correcting people on this point.

GNUstep Development Visualization using Gource :)

2010-08-10T22:13:00.000-07:00

I've just used gource to produce several videos to show GNUstep's development over the years. I've only done the parts of GNUstep which reside under core and, of course, Gorm.

Special thanks to Andy Ruder for setting up his GNUstep git repositories at gitweb.aeruder.net. :) Without these I would have had to suffer through the pain of importing GNUstep into git from SVN, not a painless operation. ;)

Hopefully, you'll see some familiar names from the past and present.

NOTE: I suggest viewing these in 720p (HD) as that will make the information easier to make out.

Here is Base:

Here is GUI:

Here is Back:

Here is Make:

Here is Gorm:

The command I used to make these was this (using gnustep-back as an example):

gource -s 0.01 --stop-at-end --highlight-all-users gnustep-back --output-ppm-stream - | ffmpeg -b 3000K -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - ./gnustep-back.mp4

I was able to download gource using Mac Ports and also got ffmpeg from the same place and installed it on my MacBook. I also have gource built on my Linux box as well and it should work the same there for anyone who wants to give it a try. :)

Analysis of the Bilski case

2010-07-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

It's unfortunate that SCOTUS has ruled as it has on In Re: Bilski since this was a landmark opportunity to strike down the patentability of software. Instead they bowed to business as usual and decided to preserve the patentability of software, so our fight goes on with respect to fighting this.

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/06/bilski-v-kappos-business-methods-out-software-still-patentable.html

While it does seem to make software harder to patent, it doesn't go far enough and it seems to be too little too late. More on this is here:

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0a681b87-8340-4759-8de9-1dd495a405e7
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100628100422167

This is a frustrating day for me and many others, since it seems to make very little change to the status quo. As others have said, this is a "no-op" and we're back to where we were before Bilski was even started.

Spam on my blog.... changing to members only for now...

2010-06-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

I've recently been getting a lot of spam on my site, so I'm changing it so that only members can make comments. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Progress on Plans for Change...

2010-05-16T22:46:00.000-07:00

The old blog post is here. Even though it's been four years, I'm happy with where things are at the moment. Over the past few years the following things from that list have been accomplished:

1) Adopt a more modern look. This includes the look of the windows, the color scheme and how the menus are rendered. It's okay to let that old gui go, it's not going to kill you to do so. ;) Users like things to look "good". This is entirely subjective. Personally, I think GNOME and KDE are quite ugly under the best of circumstances. To this end, we need to make integrated theming available in GNUstep and make it easy.

This has been accomplished by the Etoile folks without question. But my blog post was meant to push the project itself to adopt a more modern looking GUI. So far we haven't done that yet, but the mechanisms are in place now to do it. The theming engine is now much more capable than it was before and should be able to allow the creation of some killer themes.

2) Make regular releases. Start courting different distributions to include GNUstep in their package set. Start getting the word out. Start making sure that people KNOW that GNUstep is alive and well. This, I believe, is the main reason why people have the perception that GNUstep is dead. We don't push ourselves hard enough and into enough distributions to be visible enough for people to care.

Given that our last release was last year and it's now the middle of 2010, we've still got a long way to go on this one too. This release, however, was a big one since it included a lot of functionality, not the least of which is the theme engine I mentioned above.

3) Eliminate the need for GNUstep.sh, either by making GNUstep place it's binaries and libraries in more "standard" places, or by providing an installation procedure

We have a GNUstep.conf file in /etc/GNUstep which environment variables get read from.

4) Start appealing more to the Mac OS X/Cocoa crowd. While some people disagree with me, I believe that this group IS the group we need to be playing towards. In the past some have advocated that GNUstep be an "OPENSTEP-like" or a "Cocoa-like" environment. While I don't believe that GNUstep should necessarily follow all of the design decisions Apple has made, I believe that it should implement all of the classes which are useful and which are being commonly used in spite of whether or not people personally agree with having that class in GNUstep or not. A good, and recent, example of this is NSToolbar. It's not about us, remember, it's about them... the users and developers USING GNUstep. We are here to make life easier for our users not to make GNUstep into the epitome of "perfect design" by excluding classes we personally don't like. This is not productive and, not to mention, highly subjective.

This has happened. More free software and proprietary projects are starting to take notice of GNUstep and it's helped improve GNUstep since contributions have been made to the project which have increased stability, performance and efficiency for all concerned.

5) Focus and concentrate on one and only one set of display technologies per platform. We expend way too much time and energy on maintaining mulitple backends (xlib, art and etc) when we really don't have to. For Linux/BSD we have two functional backends and another on the away for cairo. What's the point of this? In my opinion we should complete the cairo backend and deprecate BOTH the xlib and art backends. xlib is hopelessly outdated and libart isn't really supported by anyone anymore.

This has happened just recently with Fred's recent change making Cairo the default backend. Cairo provides the ability for us to really forget about writing another graphical backend for any operating system that Cairo supports which takes an ENORMOUS burden off of the project and allows us to leverage the work done by the Cairo project.

6) Decide what we are. Yes, that's right. Some people view GNUstep as a desktop, others view GNUstep as a development environment. GNUstep needs to define itself as one or the other. The website says it's a development environment, but it has many aspects which fit the definition of a desktop environment. In truth, I believe it should be both.

This has happened and has worked out pretty well. GNUstep has defined itself as a development environment. GNUstep is what powers a desktop environment whether that is Etoile or just WindowMaker with GWorkspace.

7) Make GNUstep friendly with other environments like GNOME, KDE, Windows and etc. Make sure that GNUstep functions sanely in these environments. This might mean that we need to have behaviors for each different environment. How to implement this is unclear, but it's something that I believe would make the user experience better overall.

The recent theming capability has accomplished this. :)

I believe we should commit ourselves to getting the rest of these tasks completed. They should all help GNUstep move forward. Right now stability, and more applications are key for the project.

An Artist's Concept of GNUstep's redesigned UI

2010-05-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

A few years back Jesse Ross came up with this concept for a new look for GNUstep.

I'm wondering if there are any ideas/looks/concepts we can glean from this which might be of use. I have always liked the general look of it.

One person I talked to about it suggested being able to "dock" the menu bar. That is... attach it to a particular place on the screen, such as the border or something so that it could act like the menu bar on OS X, if we really wanted it to. Interesting thoughts. :)

A little fun with SIMH and OpenVMS

2010-04-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

VAX/VMS has always been interesting to me. I'm currently a member of the OpenVMS Hobbyist program, so I have a copy of OpenVMS 7.3/VAX.

I decided to run it on SIMH which is an excellent collection of software aimed at preserving computer history through virtualization of obsolete machines.

I must admit that, for me, VMS brings about a bit of nostalgia, since it's where I cut my teeth. Some of the first systems I was ever lucky enough to play with when I was young were VMS systems and it inspired me to learn more and more about software and computers in general.

What I did here uses the latest version of SIMH built for PPC. You'll need to change SIMH a little in order to get it to build on the Mac, the instructions are here. Also, you'll need to follow Phil Wherry's excellent guide on getting VMS installed in the first place, that's here. And, finally, you'll need to get DECWindows installed, that information is provided here.

Information about the VMS Hobbyist program is available from HP and from this site. The only issue I found was that it takes a while to actually get the software since they want to first make certain that you have the membership so that you will not use the copy of VMS that they send for commercial purposes. :)

A fair amount of free and open source software is available for OpenVMS. I'm currently working on installing the latest version of GCC for VAX on my virtual VAX here.

Here's Toetag. Another example of portability. :)

2010-04-19T07:17:00.000-07:00

Here's "Toetag." It's an open source Quake level editor being ported by Eric W.

As you can see he's been able to make a fair amount of progress in a number of things. The NSStepper/NSStepperCell for instance has been improved as well as Font display among other things.

Here's the original website here.

More to come... :)

TestPlant announces eggPlant for Windows based on GNUstep...

2010-04-09T10:53:00.000-07:00

Please see the following link for the official announcement. Last year TestPlant released their application for Linux based on GNUstep on that platform as well.

Native File Panels done...

2010-03-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

Bean.app on Windows with native file panels. :)

Progress on Theming...

2010-03-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

Bean running on a Mac...

Bean running on Windows (along with Ink). ;)

Looking better... next up is native dialogs.

Even more Windows stuff....

2010-01-24T14:07:00.001-08:00

Looking better... next on the list native radio buttons and other widgets.

More Windows stuff...

2010-01-15T00:44:00.001-08:00

More progress... actions are now being sent and the menu is properly rendering.

Native Menus on GNUstep coming...

2010-01-09T22:21:00.001-08:00

More progress. Native menus and scrollers. :)

GC

Windows Theming Progress

2009-12-16T12:54:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture of the Windows theme for GNUstep. This is just the initial effort. It shall be more complete in weeks to come.

GC

New Theming Capabilities...

2009-11-25T15:51:00.000-08:00

Currently there is work progressing on themes on GNUstep... here are the links for that:

GNOME Native themes:

http://stashbox.org/693247/Bildschirmfoto.png

http://stashbox.org/693249/Bildschirmfoto-1.png

http://stashbox.org/705472/Bildschirmfoto.png

We also have a native theme working on Windows. I will have a picture of that soon as well. For now the code is in the repository in the plugins section.

One thing this post doesn't show is the in-windows menus which we already have implemented. Those combined with this should give the user a totally native experience with GNUstep.

Here is the code for the gtk theme:

http://github.com/hansfbaier/gnustep-gnome

The Right Choice

2009-11-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

Here is a post about a guy trying to read webloc files on Windows. Guess which environment he chooses? ;)

http://sunflower.coleharbour.ca/cocoamondo/2009/11/opening-a-webloc-file-in-windows/

New Debian maintainer needed for GNUstep

2009-07-25T08:14:00.001-07:00

All, recently our maintainer for Debian had to resign. Thank you, Hubert, for the many years you've given us.

This means that we are now seeking a maintainer for the Debian packages. I can't stress how important this is, since it means that, unless we can find one, we will no longer be distributed with Debian and Ubuntu and other Debian related distributions.

If you are interested in doing this, please contact me at greg.casamento@gmail.com.

NEWS: eggPlant application by TestPlant, LLC ported to Linux using GNUstep...

2009-04-21T09:01:00.001-07:00

All,

After months of work, I'm pleased to announce that eggPlant, a product of TestPlant, has been successfully ported to Linux using GNUstep. All of the relavent improvements to GNUstep have been contributed back to the project and have already started to benefit the community as a whole.

TestPlant was formerly RedStone, Inc. You can visit their site at:

http://www.testplant.com.

As many of you may or may not know I've been working with projects, individuals and companies which use Cocoa to help them get onto Linux and all of the other platforms we support by assisting them in porting their applications to GNUstep.

It's important to remember that GNUstep is, first and foremost, a development environment in it's own right. Just as important, however, is the fact that GNUstep can be also used to port complex applications over to Linux and other platforms from Cocoa.

Helping companies such as this has two beneficial effects on our community... it encourages participation from developers since they can see it's being used and maintained actively and it also, through their participation, allows them to contribute code back to us that ultimately benefits the entire community.

Thanks, GC

SCALE Progress Report

2009-02-23T09:02:00.000-08:00

Well, SCALE is over and I can only say that it was great. :) I got to meet Scott Christley and I also got to meet the WindowMaker team. They're all awesome people.

SCALE is a large conference. There were a couple of thousand people there. We had about 150 people take fliers from our booth and ask about GNUstep and we did get some of the "So, when are you guys putting out the next version of WindowMaker" questions. :) I told those people about what GNUstep was and sent them to our friends at booth #37, which was the WindowMaker team.

I tried to emphasize a few things with the people who came by:

We're still alive and active
We're, first and foremost a cross-platform development evironment
We are following the Cocoa changes when we can and trying to maintain source compatibility with Cocoa and OpenStep.

I showed them Gorm and ProjectCenter. I also showed them some applications running on both GNUstep and on the Mac to illustrate portability. Scott and I discussed that, for the next conference, we want to have a DO demonstration and some more database applications to show as well as Etoile. I did show them the Etoile website and told people about both of our appearances on FLOSS Weekly (#44 and #56 for those who havent' listened yet). Scott also had some suggestions about how to improve things the next time around which I have taken to heart. He said we should concentrate more on apps as well as emphasize our development environment much more.

Most hard core developers knew who we were right off the bat, some people still had us confused with WindowMaker, but fixing that just took some explaining. Just the simple act of being here was worth it just to educate people and to make them aware of what's going on with GNUstep.

I was also approached by someone from the LinuxFund who is intersted in helping us to reach 1.0 and wants us to keep in touch with them.

We ended the first day by having dinner with the WindowMaker team: John, Erin and Kevin. We discussed the possibilities of more cooperation between GNUstep and WindowMaker, specifically getting rid of WiNGS in WindowMaker and replacing it with GNUstep.

I also got to meet Randal Schwartz (author of a number of perl books and host on FLOSS Weekly). The night before the conference I saw this:

I told him (jokingly) that I was tempted to make a post called "I can has Randal's 3G?" but I resisted the temptation. ;)

The second day of the conference wasn't nearly as busy as the first. Sunday seems to be a lot slower than Saturday at these things.

All in all, I think the simple act of being there was a good thing for GNUstep. I'm definitely planning on going to SCALE next year and, if possible, other conferences which I can easily make it to in the future. :)

GNUstep in the year 2009: A look back and a look forward...

2008-12-31T11:10:00.000-08:00

All,

Looking back on my last two years as lead, I can see that it is much harder than I originally thought it would be.

I know that I haven't always been perfect, but I'm learning. :) Also, aside from all of that... I've suffered a few very personal losses in the past year and a half that have distracted me a bit from GNUstep, but it's always remained close to my heart.

GNUstep has made some significant progress in this past year in terms of stability, completeness, and usability on UNIX-based platforms and, particularly, on the Windows platform.

I believe that the coming year holds some promise for GNUstep since I have been seeing more interest regarding porting apps for Mac OS X to GNUstep. There have also been a number of new "native" GNUstep apps from GAP and from Etoile.

I think the things we need to focus on, as a project, over the next few months are (this time in priority order):

1) Stability/Polish.
a) We're pretty stable, but there are a few places in GNUstep where we lack "polish." :) We need to make certain that a lot of the little annoyances that we are used to dealing with are taken care of as they make a huge impression when someone first sees an application which uses GNUstep in action. I leave it to other threads/discussions to hash these out, but I will mention one: Menu/Window Focus issues. :)
2) Better compatibility with Cocoa/API completeness:
a) Determine which classes GNUstep is lacking when compared against a given version of Cocoa (TBD).
b) Implement classes and methods identified in step a.
c) Better nib support for writing. Reading appears to work very well, writing nibs has a few issues which I have identified and will document as bugs.
d) perhaps more...
3) Theming
4) ObjC 2.0 (this is a nice to have...) :)

I also think that it's very important for us to stick to the goals which were set out in the blog posting I made here:

http://heronsperch.blogspot.com/2006/12/plans-for-change.html

Some of the things in the list from my blog have been achieved with great thanks to those involved in doing so (in no particular order):

* Nicola for doing such a great job on gnustep-make, and FHS support and all of his other contributions,
* Fred for his awesome work on gnustep-gui and for helping to make Windows more usable,
* Richard for his tireless work on gnustep-base,
* Riccardo for work on various applications in GNUstep and GNUstep GAP which have helped to identify issues in GNUstep itself,
* Wolfgang Lux who has been a consistently excellent addition to the team since he started contributing
* everyone else who has worked on GNUstep over the past few years.

By giving thanks to these people above, I am, by no means, minimizing the contribution of anyone not mentioned above. :)

Other goals on the list from the blog haven't been achieved yet, but I believe that all of those points are central to GNUstep's success.

With some effort, I believe that we can make 2009 a really good year for GNUstep.

Thank you, GJC

Update on Bean and Flexisheet...

2008-12-21T11:24:00.000-08:00

Well, after a number of improvements recently, Bean is a hair's breadth from working without a hitch. Please see the attached picture below. The only thing left now is to implement some new NSDocument methods which Bean requires in order to work and we should be good to go. These methods are:

-[NSDocument readFileWrapper:ofType:error:] and
-[NSDocument readFile:ofType:error]

We're also very close to getting the spreadsheet that we were working on going. It's called Flexisheet. You can see a screenshot of it here:

The apps themselves are virtually unchanged from their Mac OS X versions. The only corrections necessary in Bean were to not use isEqualTo: (which is a scripting method) and to use isEqual: to compare some objects. Other than that these apps work right from the source. Bean, in fact is built using pbxbuild which is a tool in GNUstep that builds .xcode projects directly. The pbxbuild tool is still in beta but works very well on Windows and all Unixes (Linux, BSD, Solaris). Your help in testing it would be appreciated.

Anyway... I know I don't post as often as I used to and I plan to change that. Thanks for your support of GNUstep. :)

Porting two new apps to GNUstep

2008-11-04T09:53:00.000-08:00

Currently efforts are underway to port both Bean and Flexisheet to GAP. GAP is the GNUstep Application Project.

GAP's focus from now on will be to both come up with original apps, but also to port as many apps as possible from Mac OS X/Cocoa to the GNUstep platform. This effort is an attempt to create an ecosystem of applications for GNUstep users to choose from.

While GAP itself is not a desktop project, the hope is that these applications will complement the desktop projects which do exist for GNUstep.

The GAP project is also in the process of becomming an official GNU project.

Currently, it's here: http://gap.nongnu.org

FLOSS Weekly #44: GNUstep

2008-10-12T16:15:00.000-07:00

The taping went great and the show is up in twit here. I had a great time talking to Leo and Randal and getting the word about GNUstep out. Please have a listen!

Appearance on FLOSS Weekly

2008-10-07T07:58:00.001-07:00

Hey guys... I'll be on FLOSS Weekly with Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte. The show is hosted here.

Needless to say I'm very excited to be on the show and a good friend and fellow contributor to the project, Riccardo Motolla, will be appearing with me.

Talk to you soon!!

2008-10-05T09:03:00.001-07:00

Are we really going to fall for it again?

On the market again...

2008-05-28T13:21:00.000-07:00

With my current gig ending in about 3 weeks, so I'm told, I'm in the market for a new contract position. I really want to find something that will be more interesting than most and not just any old work.

Excite me, make me learn, challenge me and, most importantly, keep me from being bored because I get bored VERY easily.

Any takers? ;)

Death knocks on our door again...

2008-05-13T09:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I'm forced to think about all of the people I've lost in the past couple of years. While I don't consider myself to be old enough to go through this, I seem to be starting to see death as an unwanted companion.

For the last two years people who have mattered to me have passed away one by one. First my Father... then my Uncle Victor, who was everyone's favorite uncle.. you know, the funny one who's good at telling jokes. Then my Uncle Frank. He was the talker the one who loved people and the one who always tried to be everyone's friend.

Perhaps the hardest blow recently to me, personally, was the death of my closest friend Jason Withers. He died of a stroke last year in December because of a piece of plaque that had formed in one of his arteries. That's a very cold and clinical description, but one I've come to accept. Jason was closer to me than a brother and I think of him often. He and I used to have a sarcastic humor together that only comes when you've known someone for many many years.

The most recent is my brother in law, Shawn. He passed away last night. He was a close friend. He suffered from cancer and fought it until the end. My sister loved him very much and she is extremely distraught over his death and, yet, I feel cold. Death has visited my family way too often in the last few years... Death is like an old friend whom you're at first surprised to see, but then becomes someone you know all too well.

I know that the emotions will come... that the tears will come... and that, soon, our pain will be done.

The one thing that all of this stresses is the importance of life. Death is the one thing that comes to us all in time. While love may elude us... death is certain. It's important to tell those that you love... that you love them without question. Because he may be at your doorstep, or theirs much sooner than either of you anticipate.

Sincerely, Greg C.

New Gorm Release!

2008-04-07T16:21:00.000-07:00

Check it out... there is a new Gorm release it's 1.2.4. Please download it and try it. You can get it at www.gnustep.org.

Bad Company

2008-02-04T21:28:00.000-08:00

As many of you who follow my blog may or may not know, I'm a software consultant. This means that I run my own small company consisting of, you guessed it... one employee... me.

Well, sometimes I find myself in the unfortunate position of dealing with an unreasonable client. Such was the case in the last 6 months. While I will not mention the client by name I will say that they were in the habit of underbidding contracts by hundreds of hours and hoping that the the heroic contractor (please note the generous dash of sarcasm here, folks) could come swooping in and save the day.

When you have project managers who don't know how to estimate jobs, then you will ultimately make mistakes that end up costing your company money. When you have people who don't understand software or how it's done and you feel like you can slog off all of the work onto your developers, you will lose developers. Herein lies the perfect way NOT to run a company because it causes several things to happen all at once:

You're customers will be angry at you for not completing the projects in a timely way.
You will piss off your developers because they will end up working 10-20 hour days. (Yes, I have worked two days in a row at one point non-stop... trust me I'm 38 and, at my age (while I'm not old... well not yet at least) my body doesn't forgive me very easily for punishing it like that. I learned this the hard way.)
You will sour your reputation in the marketplace because of both #1 and #2 because, while people will not be talking maliciously about you they will speak the truth about you. Please remember it's not slander/libel if it's true.
Because of ALL of the above you will lose money.

One of the worst situations I have run into is where companies hired account representative and "creative" people (i.e. graphic artists) and suddenly thrust them into the role of a PM. These people have no clue what to expect and tend to think of creating an application like one would think of writing a word document. They do not heed warnings, nor do they listen to reason when they make decisions that will cause issues with architecture down the road.

I have personally always seen it as my duty to keep people informed about where they can improve their business, but, sometimes, there's little you can do especially when management is unwilling to listen.

At any rate, there are good jobs and bad ones. I'm simply thankful that I'm on a good one now.

Sincerely, G.

Linus and Linux: Sycophantic Hero Worship

2007-08-19T17:10:00.000-07:00

I must admit to getting really fed up with the Linux community lately.

They seem to believe that their hero, Linus Torvalds, can do nothing wrong.

In a recent post on slashdot I said this:
For anyone who can't think for themselves, yes, his opinion really counts.

I, personally, like to form my own opinions of things. While Linux has been seized upon by people as a great operating system. The only good thing about it is that it's free.

Linux is a monolithic kernel architecture which, as many operating systems experts will tell you, has number of problems.

Don't fool yourself into thinking that he's some kind of visionary, when he's not. The man never says anything positive about anyone else's work. I find it really tiring to listen to him rail on everything under the sun... speaking of Sun. Linus railed against them for not giving anything to the community.... let's examine that assertion for a minute:

Sun has:
1) Given it's OS out under a Free Software license
2) Given it's Processor out under the GPL
3) Released Open Office under the GPL
4) Is in the process of releasing Java under the GPL.

What else would you like them to give? Does he want them to drop Solaris and start being a Linux distributor?

Linus poo-poo's CVS and SVN as being "good enough." While I agree that CVS certainly does suck, SVN is not a the piece of crap he thinks it us.

He regularly criticizes RMS. I don't agree with everything RMS says, but some of the things that Linus dings him on are completely assinine. The GPLv2 was created before certain technologies existed. The GPLv3 was made to address the problems these new technologies present... and keeps with the spirit of the GPLv2. Linus is too blind to see this.

Don't kid yourself... he's no one's hero. He's just started to believe his own press.

Good day.

Recent Fix for Gorm allows Mac style menus

2007-07-26T11:11:00.000-07:00

I made a correction this morning which allows for Gorm to have a Mac style menu when NSMenuInterfaceStyle is set to the Mac style.

You may need to remove your Gorm preferences, or at least do the following:

defaults delete Gorm NSMenuInterfaceStyle

to reset the style so that it will show up properly.

Linus, Linux and the GPLv3

2007-07-19T18:13:00.000-07:00

What most people forget is that Free Software is a balance between the rights of the creator and the user. Anything that disturbs that balance needs to be dealt with. Both patents and DRM represent things that disturb the rights of the users in favor of the creators.

RMS is not trying to force his personal beliefs on people. You don't have to change to the GPLv3, no one does. Linus, on the other hand, is coming out and engaging in name calling. I've seen more and more of this from Linus over the past few years. I don't see him as any better than RMS, in fact, I see him as worse. To me he seems like the kind of person who, if you don't agree with him, he'll freely and publicly call you names. That doesn't seem to me to be the approach of an intelligent or reasonable person. It seems to be to be the approach of someone who's ego has gotten a little too big for his own good. Not one of the reasons Linus has yet given for his dislike of the GPLv3 has made a great deal of sense from my point of view. Linus seems unable or, possibly, unwilling to engage in a debate about this pertaining to the facts of the matter. Instead he would rather distract people from the real issues by calling RMS a fanatic and calling anyone that adopts the GPLv3 hypocrites.

He states that the GPLv3 will make it difficult for business' to use GPL'd software. This is, in fact, correct. The GPLv3 will make it more difficult for companies to restrict the rights of their users (people like you and me). The GPL was meant to protect against this type of thing. As the world evolved, the GPLv2 became inadequate due to the simple fact that many of the technologies and problems which exist now did not exist when it was drafted. It therefore, has legal holes it in nowadays that one could drive a truck through. The GPLv3 was meant to address the shortcomings and, in some cases, the lack of clarity of the GPLv2. It protects the users better and is clearer on what is and is not distribution.

If Linus wants to play name calling games, that's just fine. If, however, he wants to actually discuss the facts, he and the rest of his sycophantic followers should engage the FSF in a debate.. or, at least, they should have been more of a part of the drafting of the GPLv3 than they were... certainly... if you don't put your 2 cents into something, especially when you're invited to do so (GPLv3 comments were open to the public and, indeed, Eben Moglen publicly asked the Linux contributors to participate)... then, in my opinion, you have no cause to complain when the process is finish.

Linus and his ilk had their chance to say something and they remained silent. Why should they be listened to now?

The GNUstep project is moving to the GPLv3, as are Samba and many other Free Software projects. Linus has forgotten what Free Software is all about... a balance of individual rights. The GPLv3 is, quite honestly, the best way to proceed forward, since it addresses critical issues in the previous version. If Linus want's to think us all hypocrites, then so be it. I would submit, however, that he is the one engaging in hypocrisy. When someone can take Linux and add DRM code to it and then distribute it under the GPLv2 and get away with it, then that defeats the spirit of the GPL in the first place. Perhaps, then, it's not so much hypocrisy on Linus' part as it is a sheer lack of understanding. Perhaps he never understood the GPL in the first place.

What GNUstep is and is not....

2006-12-17T21:51:00.000-08:00

Recent replies to my previous post on the gnustep-dev mailing list have made it necessary for me to further define what I believe GNUstep should become in the future.

GNUstep is a development environment and API, first and foremost. While GNUstep contains a few apps which comprise a minimal desktop... mainly GWorkspace... I feel as though it should not be considered as a desktop project. Yes, I know this contradicts what I said in part of my previous posting, but here's why I've had this change of heart. It is necessary for GNUstep to focus on being one thing and doing that extremely well. GNUstep's main purpose, like OPENSTEP's, is to provide a multiplatform development environment and API.

The way I see it right now, the project is divided into two camps:

The group of people who feel that GNUstep should be an API/development environment
The group of people who feel that GNUstep needs to be a desktop and possibly a standalone OS which is a clone of OPENSTEP/NeXTSTEP.

What I am saying is that if we do #1, #2 can follow. There is no reason why GNUstep cannot be a strong, multiplatform API AND provide the basis for a desktop/OS.

My point, quite simply is, that we must be the first one. The second one can be done in other projects. Examples of these projects are Etoile, Backbone and GAP. These projects all contain applications which make up a desktop environment on top of GNUstep. Once completed they will complement GNUstep's offering. The LiveCD provides the other part of this, which is a self-contained GNUstep environment that people can sample.

Plans for Change

2006-12-15T15:46:00.000-08:00

As Chief maintainer, it is up to me to determine the direction of the project.

Over the past several years interest in GNUstep has steadily increased, but not nearly by enough. In order to reach a wider audience, GNUstep needs to do a number of things (not necessarily in priority order):

1) Adopt a more modern look. This includes the look of the windows, the color scheme and how the menus are rendered. It's okay to let that old gui go, it's not going to kill you to do so. ;) Users like things to look "good". This is entirely subjective. Personally, I think GNOME and KDE are quite ugly under the best of circumstances. To this end, we need to make integrated theming available in GNUstep and make it easy.

2) Make regular releases. Start courting different distributions to include GNUstep in their package set. Start getting the word out. Start making sure that people KNOW that GNUstep is alive and well. This, I believe, is the main reason why people have the perception that GNUstep is dead. We don't push ourselves hard enough and into enough distributions to be visible enough for people to care.

3) Eliminate the need for GNUstep.sh, either by making GNUstep place it's binaries and libraries in more "standard" places, or by providing an installation procedure

4) Start appealing more to the Mac OS X/Cocoa crowd. While some people disagree with me, I believe that this group IS the group we need to be playing towards. In the past some have advocated that GNUstep be an "OPENSTEP-like" or a "Cocoa-like" environment. While I don't believe that GNUstep should necessarily follow all of the design decisions Apple has made, I believe that it should implement all of the classes which are useful and which are being commonly used in spite of whether or not people personally agree with having that class in GNUstep or not. A good, and recent, example of this is NSToolbar. It's not about us, remember, it's about them... the users and developers USING GNUstep. We are here to make life easier for our users not to make GNUstep into the epitome of "perfect design" by excluding classes we personally don't like. This is not productive and, not to mention, highly subjective.

5) Focus and concentrate on one and only one set of display technologies per platform. We expend way too much time and energy on maintaining mulitple backends (xlib, art and etc) when we really don't have to. For Linux/BSD we have two functional backends and another on the away for cairo. What's the point of this? In my opinion we should complete the cairo backend and deprecate BOTH the xlib and art backends. xlib is hopelessly outdated and libart isn't really supported by anyone anymore.

6) Decide what we are. Yes, that's right. Some people view GNUstep as a desktop, others view GNUstep as a development environment. GNUstep needs to define itself as one or the other. The website says it's a development environment, but it has many aspects which fit the definition of a desktop environment. In truth, I believe it should be both.

7) Make GNUstep friendly with other environments like GNOME, KDE, Windows and etc. Make sure that GNUstep functions sanely in these environments. This might mean that we need to have behaviors for each different environment. How to implement this is unclear, but it's something that I believe would make the user experience better overall.

All of this is just for starters. Anyone who is familiar with my work on Gorm knows that I tend to focus intently on things until they succeed. I intend to do the same with this project as a whole.

If you have anything to add to or detract from the above, please feel free to comment. I would love to hear all opinions.

Chief Maintainer for GNUstep

2006-12-11T13:49:00.000-08:00

I have been involved with GNUstep for seven years now, since 1999. It is my great pleasure to take leadership of the project so that I can help it grow. From my first commit to NSScreen to the latest Gorm nib modifications, this project has been a labor of love for me, and it will continue to be so for many years to come.

I sincerely hope that Adam will remain a part of the project. A "thank you" hardly expresses what the project owes him. You have our deepest gratitude, Adam, for everything.

Qt, Interface Builder and "Modern C++ programmers"

2006-11-24T15:53:00.000-08:00

I just don't understand what it is about some people. While reading slashdot, I came upon this article at regdeveloper and I'm thinking to myself that it's nice to see another crossplatform library, aside from GNUstep, in the open source world, but when I get to page 3 the author pops up with this little tidbit:

In fact, on the Mac, I find the combination of Qt and C++ far more intuitive than the weird Objective-C language and the frighteningly non-intuitive Interface Builder.

Whoa there... did he just say Interface Builder is unintuitive? Wow.... of all of the lame brained things I've heard Qt developers say, this really tops the list. If you take a look here.. you will see that it is quite easy to learn InterfaceBuilder, or alternatively, GNUstep's Gorm.

Interface Builder is built on one basic principle: making connections between objects. That's really it. Everything else is peripheral. "Modern" C++ programmers complain about Objective-C because they are completely convinced that C++ personifies what is meant by Object Oriented Programming. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. The person who coined the phrase, Alan Kay, has specifically said that when he did so he was NOT referring to C++:

I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

He, in fact, had Smalltalk in mind. Objective-C, for the uninitiated, is a dialect of C which incorporates some Smalltalk like features. So, as you can see, it is not the weirdness of Objective-C or the "non-intuitiveness" of InterfaceBuilder, but it's really the closed mindedness and relative stupidity of most "modern C++" programmers which causes this type of thing to happen.

And, as we all know, it's much less common to be intelligent than to be dumb. Perhaps this explains why there are so goddamn many of them.

Nice To See Someone Feels The Same Way

2006-09-12T20:24:00.000-07:00

It's funny, but this article here really cheered me up today. I've always, personally thougth the exact same thing about GNOME. It is butt-ugly. Nice to see someone else in this world has some sense.

New Release of GNUstep available!

2006-08-30T20:32:00.001-07:00

The latest release is available on the ftp site. You can also go to the gnustep website to download. This version has support for NSStreams, RTFD, Nibs and lots and lots more... go check it out!

Nib Encoding Now Working in GNUstep

2006-08-26T23:12:00.000-07:00

Although it's experimental at the moment it's working. As you can see here, I'm saving a nib file from Gorm to the "Cocoa Nib" format:

Here is the same nib file after being loaded into IB on OSX:

This functionality opens up all kinds of possibilities for GNUstep. It will ease porting by allowing developers to utilize one format or to easy translate from nib->gorm and vice versa. All Mac OS X developers need to do is to make sure they save the nib files as 10.2 or later, and GNUstep will be able to read the archives.

I'm going to continue refining these enhancements until they are perfected. They're very close at the moment, but like anything new they need to be shaken out a little.

Feel free to comment. Thanks, GJC

NeXTbuntu?

2006-08-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

I read a blog today called "nextbuntu" it can be seen at nextbuntu.wordpress.com. A few things stated on the website are entirely false:

1) That GNUstep has changed the names of the classes "and everything"
GNUstep has done nothing of the sort. For all of the classes in the published API of OpenStep and Cocoa, we have used the same class names, constants, method and function names. Period. It is trivial to port applications from Cocoa or OpenStep to GNUstep so long as Carbon and the Core* libraries (for which we have no equivalent) aren't used. The only classes which use GS as a prefix are private classes which are not part of the NS (Cocoa) framework.

It's immediately apparent that no review whatsoever was done by NeXTbuntu regarding the current state of GNUstep.

2) Graphics makeover
This is something that has been on the top of my personal list, as GUI maintainer, for a long time. RIO and others have made some progress in getting this done on the theme branch.

3) Give the user the option of using cascading menus instead of the menu bar.
GNUstep currently has cascading menus, it also has the capability to show the menu as a menu bar on the top of the screen. To change it is a matter of changing a default.

All of these concerns are known and are being addressed in GNUstep at present. The goal of NeXTbuntu seems compatible with that of GNUstep. The only thing about his post that concerns me is his "dislike" of the GPL. Currently GNUstep is under the LGPL, which is a "lesser" version of the GPL which lacks certain things that some people don't like about the GPL.

4) Mac OS X/Cocoa compatibility
Porting from Cocoa to GNUstep or from OpenStep to GNUstep is quite easy. Please see this link: http://mediawiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Portability for more information. Also, recently, as you may or may not have noticed, I've implemented nib compatibility, so it's currently possible to read/write nib files for use on OS X.

Cocoa compatibility is one of the main aims of the GNUstep project. It's a very challenging one because Apple keeps adding things, so It's a moving target.

5) The Desktop Env. vs Development Env. issue
GNUstep needs to be both, or, at least, have a separate desktop project which is the official desktop.

Conclusion
I would suggest that the person behind NeXTbuntu should contact a member of the GNUstep team such as myself, Richard, or Adam to discuss collaboration. If you are planning on re-writing all of this stuff yourself, good luck, but it would go much more quickly for you to use GNUstep. Also, I suggest you drop the attitude that you seem to have, it won't make you any friends.

Nib loading working in GNUstep

2006-07-15T16:16:00.000-07:00

As you can see from the screenshot, Gorm is now able to load nibs just fine.

Gorm should be able to save nibs in the next few weeks. This is a huge step forward for GNUstep. Builder and Loader classes have been added along with a factory class which gets the appropriate builder/loader for a given format. Gorm has also been changed so that it is effectively format agnostic. This means that it can accept any format that a builder/loader class can give it.

In addition to the above Gorm also uses the NSDocument* classes instead of implementing it's own framework.

Why Linux is boring

2006-04-17T05:46:00.000-07:00

It seems, for whatever reason, that the Linux community has stopped evolving. We only seem to be heading towards one of two environments: GNOME or KDE. Now, of course, I'm not blind, this trend has been obvious for a very long time. It's amusing, however, that so many people buy into it. They don't see the potential for other possibilities, and they assume that anything which challenges the current two dominant players must be "nuts".

Is this the brave new world of open source? Will KDE and GNOME be all we have? I have looked at both and I am unimpressed with what they offer. Both are poorly designed, amateurish pieces of software. They both feel like they have "evolved" to this point and were never *designed* to be like this. In my next few articles, I'll examine them both further.

A couple of ideas

2006-03-01T06:38:00.000-08:00

A few ideas have been rolling around in my head recently:

Champollion -- OSX app, most likely will need a kernel extension.... translator from x86 -> PPC (the opposite of Rosetta.app)
GNUstep ABI compatibility with Mac OS X. (suggested by aurynn)

Both of these seem like good ideas to me and I wanted to get the out someplace. ;)

GUI Maintainer

2006-02-11T23:03:00.000-08:00

I was made gui maintainer of GNUstep today. I will try to take the project forward as much as possible.

A Phone Call From An Old Friend

2005-12-26T19:35:00.000-08:00

I recieved a suprising phone call a couple of days ago. A friend I've been looking for since 1992 called. It was nice catching up with her, since she was someone I was close to. Anyway, it's nice to know that she's doing fine, even if she is 2000 miles away. We've agreed to keep in touch and make certain that it's less than 13 years before the next time we talk. :D

GUI Builders: Data vs. Code

2005-11-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

Some people are of the concerted opinion that GNUstep, Cocoa, and indeed GNOME are on the wrong path when it comes to building GUIs when compared to editors of the likes of NetBeans or Eclipse. The first set of technologies have chosen to generate data (even though Glade can generate code... the GNOME project recommends against this), whether they are serialized streams or XML, to represent thier GUIs whereas most Java GUI builders generate code.

This is a fundamentally mistaken position for a very important reason: Metadata is portable across different languages. In GNOME there is a Java interface as well as a C and C++ interface to libglade. This means that my program, no matter which of these languages it's written in, can load my interface without any problems. In NetBeans or Eclipse, it's not necessary for them to consider that SWT or Swing will ever be used by anyone but them, so they can generate the code. However, data is better in general, since it can also be manipulated outside of the program. For instance, it's possible to apply a stylesheet to an XML file and transform it as needed. Why not do this to an interface file? This way an XML interface file can be manipulated like data inside the program and the resulting XML can be loaded as the GUI.

So I hope this settles any arguments about which type is better. In my opinion, Data generating GUI builders are better, hands down.

A Father's passing

2005-11-09T21:30:00.000-08:00

This entry is dedicated to my Father, who passed away today at 11:15AM. He was the best man I ever knew. He had his faults, but in spite of them he was a good man. My relatives and I are making the final arrangements for him and the funeral will happen next Tuesday.

There were many things I didn't tell my Father before he died. It's taught me one lesson. If there's someone you care about, tell them now, if there's something you want someone to know, don't wait. Don't leave it until tomorrow... or the next day, do it *NOW* because sometimes you may not have tomorrow.

Near the end of his life, my father went into renal failure. His renal failure was brought on by his heart attack and his aneurysm before that. It came to a point in his life where he was fighting to live, not living as he once did. My Dad always used to be active, and loved to travel in his earlier years. He would sing and dance and do all kinds of things. I hope that now he can do all of those things, because wherever he is, I know he's happier.

I love you, Dad. Until we meet again...

Slashdot finally posts Gorm Announcement

2005-11-07T20:26:00.000-08:00

One of the people on the #gnustep channel on freenode posted the Gorm article which ran on slashdot earlier this week. A myriad of good, non-controversial articles were posted before hand, but were ultimately rejected. So when Malda does finally decide to publish a GNUstep article, it has to be this one, which was intended as a joke.

This post was approved not be one of Malda's minions, but apparently by Malda himself as it was approved by CmdrTaco according to slashdots entry. This is a shameful commentary on just how unreliable slashdot is as any measure of good news. Slashdot is yellow journalism at it's worst.

Slashdot's incessent rejection of Gorm 1.0 announcements

2005-11-01T18:02:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry, but am I the only person in the world getting pissed off at slashdot for rejecting my posts? Does it seem like slashdot only worries about certain peoples posts and indeed only posts on certain subjects?

The site has increasingly become an GNOME/KDE site over the course of the past few years. It's become apparent to me that no other competing API toolkit will be able to edge it's way into that site so that it can get some attention.

It's time to make a better slashdot.

Gorm 1.0 Released

2005-10-29T18:16:00.000-07:00

Gorm 1.0 is finally released. It seems like it's taken forever to get here, but it's finally done. Thanks to all who helped. There's still more I'm going to add, so this is not the end, just a bright new beginning. :)

IB/Gorm vs. Java GUI Builders

2005-10-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

This post appeared briefly on osnews.com today

It's basically a "pointer piece" about an article on informit in which the author has reached an ephiphany about how much better InterfaceBuilder is that almost any java code generation GUI builder out there. From the article "It's lightyears ahead of anything we've got in the java world."

I'm really not sure why this is such a revelation to Java folks. I also do a lot of Java programming as a consultant and I've found that there is no inherent value to code generating gui builders. They are, in most circumstances, unweildy. Many of these GUI builders don't have the concept of palettes, which allow the expansion of the basic set of widgets available to the developer, which leaves the programmer using other widget sets from another jar library on his/her own when using those.

Have we made so little progress in the last decade that programmers STILL have to trudge around making GUIs by hand? This is efficient?

Intuitive vs. Counterintuitive

In the Java gui builder world the predominant paradigm when it comes to associating widgets with methods is the event/handler paradigm, even though Java has a wonderful thing called reflection, it's not used when building GUIs in any of the gui builders I can think of. InterfaceBuilder and Gorm use the target/action paradigm. The target/action paradigm, takes advantage of Objective-C's dynamic nature to allow the direct invocation of the method against the target class. This is what I think gets most Java developers tripped up when they try to use Interface Builder, since they may not be used to this way of viewing the world.

Why Gorm could never be done in C++

2005-09-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine whom I work with regarding C++ vs. Objective-C. I told him about GNUstep and also showed him Gorm. I explained the dynamic features of Objective-C and compared it to smalltalk and Java.

When I showed him some images of Gorm from the GS website I told him that Gorm could not be done in C++. He took some offense to this and immediately asked me "May I ask why you believe this couldn't be done?"

I explained that, it's because Gorm uses does several things which depend on the dynamic nature of Objective-C in order to do it's job. Here is a quick summary of the features of Objective-C which Gorm uses:

1) Categories - many categories, these are used in Gorm to do the following things
a) add the name of the inspector class for each type of inspector to the class itself so that it can be looked up easily. Mainly adding the extensions from the IBObjectAdditions.h protocol.
b) Also used for editors inspectors.
2) Loadable bundles - The palettes, which actually make up a large percentage of the code in Gorm are actually loadable bundles. These can be loaded when the application starts or during runtime.
3) Protocols - Many many protocols in Gorm. :)
4) Dynamic binding - As such, per #3, it's important to be able to call objects without knowing thier true class.

So far as I know C++ is incapable of doing #1, and is also incapable of #3 and #4. He went on to explain that it could be done in C++ if the modeller was a "code generator" to which I responded, but mine doesn't generate any code at all. :)

The infamous "Burn-In Period"

2005-09-01T20:41:00.000-07:00

Getting a new machine is really fun sometimes, but it can also be a royal pain in the butt. I despise the "burn-in" period (as I call it). This is the period where you need to adjust and tweek and frob every knob and adjustable piece of the machine until you get it just right.

Ironically, however, I find that this burn-in time really only happens with PCs. Particularly desktop machines. Especially expensive PCs. It seems as though the more a machine costs me, the more I have to frob with it. :/ Why is this? :) There's got to be some law of nature which makes it this way. :) Whatever the cause, there's nothing like the day when you can finally declare yourself done with all of the frobbing.

This of course, all begs the question: Why didn't I need to frob with my Mac?

Potential for GNUstep

2005-08-25T05:29:00.000-07:00

Many things are happening right now with respect to GNUstep, that it's almost scary. There are opportunities that have been brought to my attention that I cannot talk about at the moment, but I can simply say that they could be very good for GNUstep's future.

It's hard not to be nervous at times like these.

Got the new machine

2005-08-19T04:35:00.000-07:00

After some hassles with Comp-USA's check writing service, I've got the new box!!

It's really sweet:

P4 630 w/ EM64T and Hyperthreading @ 3.0GHz.
2GB of RAM
120GB of HD
etc...

The challenge now will be getting GNUstep to run on the 64bit processor. Please see http://wiki.gnustep.org for more.

Broken computer

2005-08-12T08:13:00.000-07:00

Well... my computer broke because of a power surge. It seems as though the MB was fried, so I simply replaced it with the old motherboard and put in a sound card I had lying around. I realized however that, this machine is on it's last legs. I uses Socket 423, which no one makes anymore and it also uses RAMBUS memory which was fast back in the day, but is not relatively slow when compared to more recent technologies and is also hideously expensive. I've decided to get a new machine.

Preparing for Gorm 1.0

2005-07-30T06:31:00.000-07:00

It's been a real task preparing for Gorm's 1.0 release. I've been hunting down and correcting bugs for a week straight. I've also been adding documentation. Fabien Vallon has volunteered to help me with both pre and post 1.0 work, and it's working out great!

Many a new feature added this week

2005-07-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

I've been quite busy lately. I added the following features to Gorm over the past few days:

1) Added the ability to dynamically modify the pulldown using the addInspectorModeWithIdentifier:... method.
2) Also added the ability for Gorm to call delegates to help it handle different pasteboard types using the IBViewResourceDraggingDelegates protocol.
3) Added a new layout menu which allows the developer to automatically layout the set of currently selected views. The user can other bring a view to the front, push it to the back, align it to the center, left, right, top or bottom relative to the other views.

Nicolas Roard's amazing StepTalk palette

2005-06-18T16:13:00.000-07:00

As the author/maintainer of Gorm this was actually something I had meant to do myself, but Nicolas has done it!! It's amazing. To be able to edit and modify StepTalk scripts and virtually create the entire application within Gorm itself is quite something.

Please see the "Random Thoughts of a Camaelon" link.

The Book of Rules

2005-06-17T05:20:00.000-07:00

Here's my book of rules. Occasionally I quote this. It's a collection of personal facts/rules that I have been compiling for some time.

Here it is:

Greg's Rules

0. In any situation involving people, there will always be politics.

1. 99% of the general public ( including technical people ) are not willing to learn anything new unless they absolutely must.

2. Most people are out for their own interests only and do not care about the big picture.

3. The mainstream media is both fickle and stupid.

4. Given a set of technologies, the worst one of the group will almost always prevail since it is
understandable to the lowest common denominator of people (see rule #1).

5. The general public will crucify that which doesn't follow the norm (again see rule #1).

6. Being a realist about how software development works is essential, idealists tend to always loose.

7. The next guy who stands up and says "look at me i've got all of the answers", usually doesn't.

8. Most things which start with Open* usually aren't. Examples OpenLook (proprietary), OpenVMS (proprietary)... etc.

9. There is such a thing as an arrogant, conceited, idiot.

10. Bugs happen.

11. Any technology which doesn't make it in the first year, won't.

12. Rule for technological success:
For a product to beat out an encumbent product in the same space, it must not violate any of the following rules:

1) It must be at least 3 times better than it's competition
2) It must be easily understandable
3) It must be affordable

Violation of any one of these rules will spell disaster for a new technology no matter how cool.

13. People tend to immediately blame that which they do not understand, usually due to their own ignorance.

14. Most people will continue to use that which they are used to despite the presence of a superiour product.

15. Rules you must know in order to appear as a genius to your co-workers:

1) Never admit that you don't know something, there's always plenty of time to look it up.
2) Never, under any circumstances, document anything. This impacts job security.
3) Always hang out with the other so called "geniuses" on the project, so that you,
by association, will be considered a genius.
4) Always eschew the opinions of others as nothing, meaningless and beneath notice.

16. People will use your software in the most obtuse, indirect and unexpected way imaginable.

17. "Why specifications survive" -- Inspired by something I once read, but can no longer find... Ever wondered why bad specifications survive? Here's a good example. Take a look at the standard railroad track. It's about three feet across. Well, the reason it's about three feet across is because the people who were employed to make the railroads were wagon makers. These wagon makers were usually immigrants from different parts of Europe who, of course, made wagons there. Well, the wagons in Europe needed to be a certain width, to fit the ruts in the road which exist due to hundreds of years of wear and tear. These ruts were caused by Roman chariots from when significant portions of Europe were under the control of the Roman Empire. As it turns out, a chariot is about as wide as the hind quarters of a horse. So the next time you wonder what horse's ass came up this this design, you'll have something to reflect on.

18. Untested code never works the way you think it will, so please test.

Love/Hate with IBM

2005-06-14T18:08:00.000-07:00

Okay... ever since I heard that IBM is more or less responsible for the current Apple PowerPC->Intel switch, I'm a little pissed off at IBM. IBM doesn't see any profit in making thier processor faster for Apple unless Apple invests heavily in the PowerPC's development. That is to say that Apple needs to pay handsomely AND IBM will own the result, that wreaks.

It seems, from all accounts, that Apple was pretty much painted into a corner. They couldn't make the profits they wanted without the 3GHz PowerPC desktops and G5 laptops, but they would have to give up that profit to IBM. That sucks.

Okay.. so now I hate IBM because of Apple, but I love IBM because they are defending the OS community against people like SCO. My heart is torn to pieces.

Comcast calls right on que

2005-06-11T05:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you have to wonder. They called me on Thursday, right after Verizon fixed their problem. I really think they must have known or something.

Anyway, the guy is supposed to come today to set things up, so I'm here waiting for him.

My Disappointment with Apple

2005-06-11T05:44:00.000-07:00

Although Apple moving to Intel is good news, it's terrible news that Mac OS X will not run on plain vanilla Intel machines. Steve and Co. really need to get their act together and let this fly.

If people could buy OS X for their PC I bet you would get a lot of people switching to OS X who would never have thought about getting a Mac before. If the "essence of the Mac" is truly the operating system, as Steve himself said in the keynote speech, then why should Apple be afraid of this prospect?

Apple goes Intel -- Implications and predictions

2005-06-08T15:49:00.000-07:00

Wow. In a stunning move Apple has decided to go to Intel processors. Being an ex-NeXT guy I can tell you that I've always known that OS X was leading a double life on intel processors. This might actually be some very exciting news.

A few questions come out of this event:

Q1) What does this mean for Linux?
Q2) How will this effect Windows?
Q3) What does this mean for GNUstep?

A1: Basically nothing. Mac OS X cannot compete with the price of Linux or the *BSDs. It's $129. FLOSS will always be very cheap or freely available.
A2: It will likely have a good deal of impact on Windows. There is already a project called MacWINE whose purpose is to allow the Mac to run Windows programs. Once OS X is running on Intel, I predict that this project or something very much like it will become a centerpiece of OS X's collection of standard programs. This would remove the common excuse most people give for not using a Mac: "There's no software for it."
A3: This could be an opportunity for GNUstep to shine. If GNUstep can become the equivalent of Wine for OSX, then it bodes well for GNUstep. Additionally, Apple is unlikely to port its APIs elsewhere (i.e. to other environments) so GNUstep will be necessary to fill this gap.

Busy week

2005-06-08T13:45:00.000-07:00

Verizon really needs to care more about it's customers. My DSL went down on Sunday morning at 1:30AM and stayed down until yesterday. It has been intermittent since then. While it seems solid now, the experience has shaken my confidence on Verizon greatly.

I'm wondering if it might not be time to switch to a cable modem.

The Trip To Massanutten

2005-05-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

It wasn't all that bad. I really need to go down there more often. I take back some of the things in my previous posting. The kids had a great deal of fun playing with both my brother's kids and David's kids. We should get them together more often.

Family Dilemma

2005-05-27T05:47:00.000-07:00

We found out a month ago that my Uncle has stage four cancer. Bummer. He's my favorite uncle. I have yet to really deal with the fact that he's sick because he looks okay to me.

Also, I need to work from home today to finish some things, so it makes packing a pain.