Quentin,

--- Quentin Mathé <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Just a quick mail to tell you about new Linkback nice demo movies 
> <http://commons.ucalgary.ca/~king/projects/keynoteplugins/linkback/>
> 
> May be we should start by using Linkback and moving it gradually on top 
> of NSDataLink ? 
>
> I think Linkback code is simple and short then LinkBack is probably 
> easy to port to GNUstep…
>
> Well I will probably ask Gregory (working on NSDataLink) about the 
> results of its discussion with Nisus guy.

I spoke with the creator of the project, Charles Jolley.  And, from looking at
the code, it appears that LinkBack's purpose is simply to enable an application
to send data to another application, have that application edit/change it and
return it.   Here's what he said in his email to me:

"My brief review of the NSDataLink documentations leads me to think 
it is geared more towards linking the content of one document to 
another so that when one document changes, the other can be updated 
automatically, rather link Publish and Subscribe on the Classic Mac OS. 
LinkBack is more akin to object embedding in OLE, where data actually 
lives in a document and can be sent back to another application to be 
modified and returned."

His assessment of what datalink does is essentially correct.  What he's missing
is the concept of NSSelection, which can be made to describe a portion of a
document.

LinkBack is architecturally simpler than NSDataLink et al.  I believe,
ultimately, that NSDataLink is a better solution (it will be, once it
finished).
 
> Anyway I'm pretty pessimistic on this point, may be I'm totally wrong, 
> but I think Nisus guys in a marketing way have no interests to 
> collaborate with GNUstep people on NSDataLink & co, because they would 
> lost the buzz (beneficial for their brand and their products) involved 
> by the fact they wrote "this revolutionary technology" that nobody has 
> thought before to extend Cocoa :-/

There is no better way to show them that it's not new than to finish
NSDataLink.  I will work on it as much as I can, but if anyone else wants to
help me, they are very welcome to do so.

> I hope they are going to contradict me :-)
> 
> Quentin.
> 
> --
> Quentin Mathé
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]

GJC

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

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