More Windows stuff...

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

Native Menus on GNUstep coming...

More progress. Native menus and scrollers. :)

GC

Windows Theming Progress

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...

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

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

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...

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

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:

1. We're still alive and active
   
2. We're, first and foremost a cross-platform development evironment
3. 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...

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...

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

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

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

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!!

Are we really going to fall for it again?

On the market again...

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...

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!

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

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:

1. You're customers will be angry at you for not completing the projects in a timely way.
2. 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.)
3. 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.
   
4. 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

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

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.