Re: GNUStep, OpenStep, NextStep, Cocoa port?
Re: GNUStep, OpenStep, NextStep, Cocoa port?
- Subject: Re: GNUStep, OpenStep, NextStep, Cocoa port?
- From: Gregory John Casamento <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 12:24:28 -0800 (PST)
Jiva/William,
"Their goal on the visuals are to reproduce the NeXT environment which today looks very dated and does not at all integrate well with gnome or kde. Even on windows it has the NeXT look and feel. "
We realize that it's somewhat dated and are working on updating the look.
Theming is very high on the list of things for the GNUstep team to tackle in the coming year. While GNUstep is focused on the API, other projects, such as Etoile, are focused on created a comprehensive environment based on GNUstep. The Etoile project provides a theme engine known as Camealon which can be used to make GNUstep's look very modern.
The project is here: http://www.etoile-project.org/etoile/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
As you can see, from the screenshots there, the look of GNUstep when using the their theme engine is very modern. We still need to work on some additional issues to make it blend a little better with the native system. We're not finished with this effort, so there is more to come.
"I often wish Apple took more interest in spreading Cocoa to other platforms. Releasing the 2.0 changes is great but only a small part of that."
I think we're all well aware that the probability of something like Cocoa for Windows being released is quite low. Also, I would argue that it would very likely have a similar problem, just look at Safari on Windows, it fails to blend and looks like a Mac OS X application.
My advice is that, if you would like to port your application to GNUstep from Cocoa, then please keep in contact with us on the gnustep development mailing lists and let us know what difficulties you face during the port, we're ready to help you. Our goal is to provide a first class development environment for as many platforms as possible.
The GNUstep wiki page is here: http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Main_Page
And a page specifically regarding portability is here: http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Writing_portable_code
The GNUstep IRC channel on irc.freenode.net is #gnustep and #gnustep-dev, feel free to stop by.
I hope this helps.
Sincerely,
Gregory Casamento -- Principal Consultant - OLC, Inc
# GNUstep Chief Maintainer
----- Original Message ----
From: Jiva DeVoe <email@hidden>
To: William Zumwalt <email@hidden>
Cc: Cocoa-Dev <email@hidden>
Sent: Saturday, March 8, 2008 11:43:37 AM
Subject: Re: GNUStep, OpenStep, NextStep, Cocoa port?
I've done a lot of looking into this. The results are:
If its a command line app that uses foundation only, its very easy. In
fact I'd go so far as to say GNUstep is a viable Objective C version
of the C++ standard library in terms of portability. Note: apple is
even working on releasing the Objective-C 2.0 features to gcc in the
coming year.
The GUI side is not quite so rosy a picture though. While its possible
to load cocoa nibs directly in GNUstep and thus probably the
portability issue is still not so bad, this means your app will really
only integrate well into the GNUstep environment aesthetically. This
environment is different from all the Linux desktop environments and
users either like it or not. Their goal on the visuals are to
reproduce the NeXT environment which today looks very dated and does
not at all integrate well with gnome or kde. Even on windows it has
the NeXT look and feel. The GUI I think also probably is current maybe
to jaguar, and does not support bindings I think.
So depending on how forgiving your users are, this is a definite
maybe. On the other hand, its open source, and if you have the
resources to contribute to it to make cocoa apps more portable that
can be great too.
I often wish Apple took more interest in spreading Cocoa to other
platforms. Releasing the 2.0 changes is great but only a small part of
that.
I'd love to be able to tell fresh college students to learn objective-
c because it will help them work on any platform.
--
Jiva DeVoe
http://www.random-ideas.net
On Mar 8, 2008, at 12:20 AM, "William Zumwalt" <email@hidden>
wrote:
> Anyone have any experience trying to port a Cocoa XCode app to
> linux? Are
> the GnuStep or OpenStep libs compatible w/ Cocoa's NextStep? I'd
> really like
> to try this if it will work and wondering if anyone else has done
> the same.
> It's not a simple command line app in obj-c, but rather, uses Cocoa
> and was
> developed on Tiger, haven't made the move to Leopard yet.
>
> Any help, advice much appreciated.
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