State of the 'Step

[J. Jordan]

After a couple of weeks of tinkering around, downloading every GNUstep 
application, bundle, framework and dependency I could find I believe I 
have a pretty functional system that demonstrates the current state of 
GNUstep.

First some notes:

1.) I am intentionally cross posting this in the hope that it ill get 
some action on the underused Applications mailing list, so if you are 
reading this on the General list please pop over to the Applications 
list to leave your pithy comments, corrections, impeachments and 
flames.

2.) After an aborted attempt to use the latest cvs version of 
base/back/gui I decided to stick with the "current release" as 
installed by startup 0.23.0  I did build the arts backend as I could 
not tell which backend Startup had built.

 3.) I would consider myself a power user but am by no means a 
developer (I am currently working my way through Dan Gookin's _C for 
Dummies_)

I am running GNUstep on top of WindowMaker with DND and UserMenus 
compiled in from cvs.  I have compiled most of the below listed 
applications several times.  The best resource I have found for 
patches is the Debian Patch tracking system,

http://patch-tracker.debian.org/

I am writting this on LuserNET-0.4.2 which compiled and ran perfectly 
on the first try.  I have downloaded and partially read all of the 
GNUstep mailing lists as well as the one active WindowMaker mailing 
list and posted one message, this will be my second.  Not a single 
crash so far,  wish I could spell check.

SimpleAgenda cvs-714 is perhaps the very best individual scheduling 
application in existence, for the first time in history I can actually 
syncronize my schedule on my computer, the Internet and my pda/phone 
(currently an Android) I'm using GCalDameon (an evil Java program) to 
actually perform the sync with Gcal but SimpleAgenda's handling of the 
.ics file makes it possible.  Philippe Roussel has created an awsome 
program and was extremely helpful getting it to do exactly what I 
wanted. It is light, great looking and I have not been able to crash 
this version.

GNUmail is my daily email client, Tim Kack helped me get that running 
and I am using it in conjunction with offlineimap (which is a python 
program ( I hate python))  to provide offline and online access to 
gmail.  Occasional crash but works rather well.

GWorkspace is my file manager, still learning to use some of the 
capabilities, occasional crashes and I wish it did a few things a 
little differently, will file some bug reports and requests.

TextEdit-4, the only text editor I have found that can open an 
arbitrarily extensioned text file, works well.  Placing it on the 
GWorkspace shelf allows you to drag and drop any text file to open it 
including all of the README's, NEWS's and things like that.

The non -Etoile version of Vindaloo-0.2 is my PDF viewer of choice, it 
has by-far the best UI of any of the PDF viewers, cannot understand 
why the Etoile folks moved the controls to the top of the window it in 
their version but to each their own.  YAP works pretty well also but 
the ever growing string of radio buttons at the top is off-putting.

MPDCon-1.1.99 is currently my primary music player, I hacked in a 
different icon, buttons more to my taste and reorganized the UI a bit 
(Have I mentioned that I love Gorm).  It works great and I don't 
remember it crashing.

MplayerGS-0.6 had to hack (that is hack as in hatchet-job not hack as 
in I know what I'm doing) the source code a little to get it to stop 
making videos double height, pasted on some different button icons 
using Gorm and rearranged the UI a bit.  It has been rock solid 
through several movies and music files.  ( I like the idea of using 
established, mature projects to provide underlying function.)

Terminal0.9.6, Have had one open as root and one as me for days 
without a crash, played with some of the service from TextEdit, 
changing background color is still a little flaky.

PRICE, Photoclip, Toyviewer and LaternaMagica all work reasonably well 
but none of them do everything I want.  I want a reasonably sized 
default display of a picture, ability to move easily through pictures 
in a directory, crop using a lasso style selection and the ability to 
use as a Service to insert pictures in other apps;  I know that is a 
lot to ask

Just a couple more:

TalkSoup is working well for me, could not get it to work on newer 
versions of base/back/gui.
Zipper, wish it did not depend on Renissance, put an * in for the 
filename to gunzip to a directory.
DictionaryReader works but can't seem to automatically access the 
server.
Charmap required a patch but you got to have it.
AClock, Batmon, Timemon all work pretty well.
FTP works but needs to store addresses.

There are more that I am using but this is too long a post already.

The one program I really would like to get working reliably is 
CodeEditor (Still trying to finish Dan Gookin's book) If anyone has  
patches for it please let me know.  Tried to email Yen-Ju Chen but the 
email got bounced.


Please point me toward other useful GNUstep programs, Vespucci looks 
very promising and I wish Bean And Flexisheet were in a state that I 
could at least play with them.

-j