Re: New ProjectCenter Icons

[Nicolas Roard]

On 9/14/07, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns@computer.org> wrote:
> But we are back on the implementation level and I think the basic
> direction should come from a users's perspective. If they want to see
> multiple applications or a single, central one.
>
> Any daily GORM/PC users out there to comment?

Not sure if I'm a daily user, but I use gorm quite often ;-)
But I'm on the "small apps focused on one job" philosophy -- that's,
for me, the whole point of GNUstep...

Yes, it is more complex to have many apps working together than to
have a monolithic application.

But I don't think it's a good enough reason to not do it -- there are
other advantages for users. Mainly, if things are separated, you could
as a user replace some of the apps by others; right now ProjectCenter
is quite nice, but a few months ago I would have choosen
ProjectManager over it. And some people are just addicted to emacs...
Same thing for the text editor that you use (not easily possible to
turn that into another application though, but this obviously ask for
a plugin mechanism for example). Or let's say the Diff application --
we can use EasyDiff but you may prefer something else... etc.

To me it's more important to provide freedom to users to customize
their workflow than to simplify the task of ProjcetCenter/Gorm
developers by writing a huge monolithic application.

Also, by separating the code in different apps, you don't tie one part
with the other -- eg something can hang/crash in one app without
bringing everything down.

So really, many apps cooperating together just seems more sensible and
much more inline with the gnustep philosophy.

Now the question is how to make that cooperation happens ? The
simplest way to me is not to use DO (which would introduce too much
coupling) but distributed notifications -- let just Gorm sends a
notification when it generates a class file, let PC sends a
notification when the user adds a resource, etc. Notifications would
be better if one app crashes than DO, and more importantly would be
inherently open to any applications wanting to listen for them, thus
enabling a much easier cooperation mechanism.

-- 
Nicolas Roard