On 2/17/07, Guenther Noack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hi!

On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 02:09:00AM +0000, Nicolas Roard wrote:
> - Easy to use: we try to focus on it, we kinda follow the NeXT HIG or
> the Apple one. I think it's more an attitude than a real process
> anyway, [...]

I disagree a bit that good user interfaces can be built "by attitude".
;-) But streamlining stuff is very good. I'm very happy with how good
DictionaryReader fits into the "Etoile experience". I've become quite
used to it now that it has a shortcut I can remember. :-)

Well, take it the other way: without "the attitude" you won't build
good user interface anyway !! ;-)
I was just pointing that we have quite a few UI-nazi around to
criticize our UI, so I think we can do well :-)
Beside, most of us use or did use NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/MacOSX, and I
think you get used to good UI ..

A simple an good principle is to keep things streamlined.

> - projects: the general idea of projects is persistence
> [...]

I like the projects idea. IIRC, I read in some other mail that it's
planned to be possible to open multiple projects at once, where the same
application may be running in two instances. I have some concerns about
that. As far as I know, it's a very integral idea in OpenStep that every
application runs only once for each user. This is thus an assumption the
whole API is designed with. For example, to talk to an application from
another application (using NSConnection of something, I never really
used that), you just have to provide its name. So this will probably
introduce lots of inconsistencies. I fear that it may not be possible to
open multiple projects at once without doing very major modifications to
GNUstep.

That's a good point. I think we talked a bit about doing that, but it
probably will cause havoc; so it will make more sense to have only one
instance -- it won't be a problem as the apps will have a specific
sets of methods to deal with projects. It's a problem at the moment
because apps do not know about projects (eg, windows positions are
saved when you quit, instead of beeing saved by project, etc.)

> 3) NSDataLink. I'm working a bit on it. NSDataLink let you link
> documents -- or part of documents -- to other documents. For me, it's
> key to ?toil?. [...]

As I never had the opportunity to work on a NeXT machine, I am not
familiar with NSDataLink. I basically only know it from that NeXTstep
3.0 demo video where Steve Jobs demoes exactly that DTP scenario.

Does NSDataLink only work for things that provide a NSImage, or is it
also possible to use it for other data types? At the moment, it's a bit
hard for me to imagine another scenario apart from DTP, where it might
be used. Is there some good information page about it on the internet?

It works with the pasteboard ! so you can put a bunch of datatype; the
receiver application will simply get the datatype it knows about. If
it only knows about NSImage, so be it; but nothing prevent you to have
more complex datatypes.

--
Nicolas Roard
"La perfection, ce n'est pas quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, c'est
quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher." -- Antoine de St-Exupéry

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