This certainly seems like quite the interesting project! However, one
thing I am concerned about is that this does not really show GNUstep's
ability to port modern software, and it also is probably not a use case
that is not already covered by MuseScore (which is the predominant
open-source music notation software and is very actively maintained).
On 9/23/25 03:49, Paul Seelig wrote:
On 9/23/25 02:50, Ethan C wrote:
I've always thought that it would be good to try to port macOS
applications to GNUstep, for a few reasons:
* It shows that GNUstep is complete enough to port real applications
* It helps show us in which areas we are weak or strong at
* It could potentially get us new users, especially for users who
are migrating from macOS to GNU/Linux or who use multiple
operating systems regularly
The current wishlist on the wiki does not really have many good ideas
for existing applications to port, so I looked for some high-quality
Objective-C + AppKit applications that might be interesting (see the
wishlist below). I'd like to hear your thoughts.
In fact, there are quite a few very interesting projects but which are
rarely mentioned anywhere and thus languish unnecessarily.
There also is a short list at https://wiki.debian.org/DebianGNUstep
which includes the following music notation software rooted in
NeXTSTEP and later OPENSTEP:
Calliope Music Notation Editor
https://web.archive.org/web/20020207022333/http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk:80/~wfc/calliope.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20011214163302/http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk:80/~wfc/calliope-further.html
https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/audio/editor/_Calliope.3981.README.html
Originally developed on NeXSTEP, it appears to since have been
ported to OPENSTEP 4.2, with further work begun to make it compile on
MacOS X and also create a GNUstep version:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/calliopemusic/
https://sourceforge.net/p/calliopemusic/news/
Work appears to have stalled in 2009 and the code base was
copied/migrated to github:
https://github.com/leighsmith/calliopemusic
https://github.com/leighsmith/MusicKit
For people still running NeXTSTEP (works great in the previous
emulator http://previous.nextcommunity.net/), Calliope can be easily
installed, but ultimately requires a commercial music font named
Sonata which is not freely available anywhere. So there is also an
urgent need to create a free music notation font, either from existing
variants (Lilypond, MusicTeX, ?) or from scratch. See
https://sourceforge.net/p/calliopemusic/mailman/message/642669/ for
details.
This certainly is a very difficult endeavour to undertake, but it
could have the potential of becoming the first killer app GNUstep is
still sorely missing.
Current project maintainer Leigh Smith has been added in stealth mode
via BCC in case he might be interested to weigh in somehow.
Regards,
Paul Seelig
