INK: The GNUstep Text Application

[Fred Kiefer]

As there was that application hype in the GNUstep mailing list, I also
wanted to join it and so I wrote my first GNUstep application: Ink. Of
course it is a simple text editor. I stole the beautiful icon, that
Andrew Lindesay prepared for the GNUstep text application, based the
program on the document framework, that was implemented by Carl Lindberg
<address@hidden> and followed Nicolas tutorials get get it
working and used his memory panel to find some leaks. What was left to
do were a few lines of actual application logic and this are mine!
So I am very proud to present an application with about 50 line of
application specific code (beside the menu and window setup, that really
should come from Gorm, but blow up the code to some 500 lines). This is
a full functional replacement for the old Edit application. If there is
nobody to oppose this, I would like to delete Edit from our Testing
directory, as that code really wont help anybody in writing a GNUstep
application.

Perhaps Nicola could use the Ink application to write a new tutorial on
document applications? (Telling me, how I should have done it) And
Richard could explain how to define those menu entries with Gorm and
perhaps even the window code, if we reorganize it a bit)? And finally
Phillip could show how to define the property list for the applications
file types (That is the magical part of the document framework that lets
all the parts work together in harmony) in ProjectCenter? Then writing a
document application in GNUstep would be pure fun.

But before we all start to write document based applications there are a
few more things to do in the GNUstep library:

* First of all there is some memory leak, that makes Ink only usable for
small RTF files. As I am having a lot of problem with memory management
myself (Sorry, but I worked with garbage collecting languages for the
last five years, so I am not used to do it myself), this might be
somewhere in my code.
* Somehow the colour panel gmodel seems to be broken.
* Than I added some menu items that would be useful but currently don't
have any implementation. (Perhaps...)
* As all of you know there is still a lot to do in the layout manger and
all the other text classes.
* And finally there is the obscure problem, that the application is
getting the runPageLayout: call, not the document, although this is the
delegate of the window. This does not change anything, as page layout is
not working at all, but still I am wondering why.

That said, have fun with our new application.

Fred