Re: Look and Feel

[Gregory John Casamento]

--- Nicolas Roard <nicolas.roard@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Le 13 févr. 05, à 09:56, Gregory John Casamento a écrit :
> 
> >> Apple spends millions of dollars getting its interface right. Even
> >> Steve Jobs who manages to force a single button mouse down our throats
> >> realized that an made the change.
> >
<snip>
> >
> > To quote Avie Tevanian, concerning the typical Apple user's reaction 
> > to the
> > NeXT IU: "It's as if we're in the land of the blind offering eyes and 
> > they balk
> > at the color."
> 
> Nice quote ;-)

Thanks. :)

> >
> >> Critical issues like this must be very well thought through before
> >> implementation.
> >>
> >>
> >> That aside, I must say that I am VERY dissapointed to see KDE and
> >> GNOME take such a lead over a GNUSTEP based environment.
> >>
> >> It will be easier to sell (GNUSTEP/Objective-C) to developers if some
> >> of apple's well thought out interface ideas are adopted.
> >
> > Me too, but I'm not sure that the reasons you cite are the reasons why 
> > it
> > happened. :)   The main reason GNOME and KDE "took the lead" is 
> > because of
> > developer stupidity, yes that's right, stupidity.
> >
> > Many devs don't want to learn anything new, and a lot of devs wanted a 
> > C++ or a
> > Java based environment because that's what was most "popular."
> 
> I *really* don't think that. Sure, some people only want one language. 
> But the majority of the people that works on GNOME and KDE are far from 
> being "stupid". GNUstep is *only recently* something a gui developer 
> can really use. You can't blame people for choosing something that 
> *works* like KDE or GNOME or XFCE or whatever, over GNUstep. Wasn't 
> miguel de icaza involved a bit in gnustep at one point ?

GNUstep does work and has worked for a couple of years now.   Yes, recently,
it's become quite stable, much more so now than ever before.
 
Miguel was, I believe, on the lists for a few days and decided to do GNOME
instead.

> We can regret that more people didn't participate in the project from 
> the beginning;
> but 1) the language wasn't well known which surely didn't help -- how 
> many of us took a look to Erlang, Ada, OCAML ? a bit 
> hypocrit/unrealistic to call any person that don't know ObjC "stupid" 

The term "stupidity" is probably a bit harsh, perhaps "lack of awareness"
should be substituted.  

> 2) the NeXT development way wasn't well known by most of linux users -- 
> hence it was very difficult to explain why it was really worth it 
> instead of jumping to KDE (for example)

Agree.  But is has been around and in everyone's face in the form of Cocoa for
a while now.  So, to see people choose KDE or GNOME and call it "superior" is
naturally frustrating.
 
> 3) OOP in general wasn't really 
> well known, and it's still a bit the case.

True.

> If I take my case, I only became interested in GNUstep 3-4 years ago 
> when I saw GNUMail and realised, hey, you can really program things 
> with GNUstep now. I admit I was very curious and interested by NeXT, 
> and when I knew about the GNUstep project (perhaps 5-6 years ago) I 
> wanted to know more. But then, well, it was quite complex to install, 
> it wanted to have this display postscript thing, etc. All in all it 
> appeared as something too complex to be involved in for the moment.. 
> and I think a lot of people were in the same position. On the other 
> hand, KDE was working quite well. And Qt is a very nice toolkit -- 
> borrowing some ideas from ObjC with their signal/slots mechanism...
> 
> The main problem at the time, imho, is that even people who could agree 
> that the project was sound, could have been discouraged by the sheer 
> amount of work needed to complete it. KDE or GNOME on the other hand 
> were already running (sortof) because they were built on top of 
> existing libraries. I remember people were saying "yes, we're 
> doing/using KDE, but it's temporary, in a couple of years from now 
> we'll have GNUstep and that will rock". In 96-97.

That's good to hear.

> There's no need to call people stupid while everything could be 
> explained by the way the events unfolded... and I really don't think 
> beeing arrogant will help the project to attract people (strange like 
> Mac users, Smalltalkers, Lisp-ers, NeXT devs, etc., can be arrogant 
> sometimes -- don't you think it's not exactly helpful for your "cause" 
> ? Beeing *right* doesn't help it seems).

It's funny how that works isn't it?

I apologize for using the word "stupidity."   Also I hadn't considered that
there were devs and users waiting for GNUstep to be usable.

> -- 
> Nicolas Roard
> "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
>   -Arthur C. Clarke

Later, GJC

=====
Gregory John Casamento 
-- CEO/President Open Logic Corp. (A MD Corp.)
## Maintainer of Gorm (IB Equiv.) for GNUstep.