Re: First Impressions of GNUStep

[Banlu Kemiyatorn]

Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
> Banlu Kemiyatorn writes:
>
> > well.. I was in wmaker core for years. I think understand the point but 
> > I didn't mean that..
> > er.. what should I say? it's like, from the shot, only if the dock.app 
> > is running, the
> > appicons will appear at the bottom left not attaching to the dock... I mean,
> > it would be easier if each app don't have to maintain their own app icon
> > and one app can centralize all control over app icon which should be 
> > simpler.
>
>
> Actually,  it's  quite  simple.   The  app  icon  is  managed  by  the
> NSApplication class.  That  means, by code that is  in only one place:
> the shared library.

What I was really thinking.. is that I want to be able to easily replace
the NeXT style dock with MacOSX's. (although I prefer NeXT's style 
personally)

> So there is already the centralization you want.

Since each app has their own NSApplication, I wonder if it is easy
for the code to centralize data, such as another app's app icon
geometry. But I don't think this isn't an issue. Since your solution is 
what exactly I want, I think.

> But this solution  allows in addition a given  application to subclass
> NSApplication  and override  any behavior  with respect  with  the app
> icon.   This is  particularly handy  when  you want  to have  animated
> icons, or to report status in it.

I think this is really nice.

> Moreover, with the adequat API, this allow a given application to hide
> its app icon.  There was  a problem here in NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, because
> there was no  clean API to do  that, but it was still  possible at the
> level of Display-PostScript.

*nod*

> Once  again,  I  think   that  behavior  (or  architecture)  of  other
> environments should not be confused with that of NeXTSTEP/GNUstep, and
> I see no reason for GNUstep to be architectured like KDE or GNOME.  If
> what you want is the look of  NeXTSTEP in KDE, it seems to me that you
> have it already with WMaker.

I don't care much about the look. I just want a fair state, that at this
fair state, GNUstep applications should work properly on other
environments. And has a plus (hiding,docking,etc) when they operate on 
the GNUstep environment. The menu on sloppy focus thingy is another issue.