Re: Starting an application wondering about setup

[Christopher Culver]

Hi Liam,

Welcome to the GNUstep world. I have some comments on your approach below.

> I am going to start my first GNUstep application and I was wondering if I
> am going about it the correct way.  The main window will look something
> like this.
>
>
>      ---------------------------------------------------
>      |                                                 |
>      |                  editing view                   |
>      |                                                 |
>      |                                                 |
>      |                                                 |
>      ---------------------------------------------------
>      |                                                 |
>      |        Stuff that can be dragged up to          |
>      |         the editing view for editing            |
>      |                                                 |
>      |                                                 |
>      |                                                 |
>      ---------------------------------------------------

I would recommend putting the "Stuff that can be dragged..." on top. If I 
understand it correctly, you want something like a shelf (see NeXT's Workspace.app or 
GS's GWorkspace), which is located on top of the app window.

> I'm mainly concerned with how I should implement the GUI as GUI
> programming is new to me.  Are NSView objects the correct things I should
> be working with here or have I missed some other object that can be used
> for dividing the window into two seperate parts?

Most of the list would tell you to use Gorm (GNUstep's clone of NeXT's 
Interface Builder), while I'm a big fan of doing the GUI by hand. Choose the 
approach that seems more comfortable for you. If you're doing the GUI by hand, 
the easiest way to arrange visual elements is by using GSHbox's and GSVbox's. 
However, these are GS extensions that would stop you from making your UI 
compatible with Cocoa. If you want your app to be portable to OSX, it's 
probably best to use Gorm. But if you want to tailor your app for GNUstep 
users, it's IMHO a good idea to take advantage of the GS*box extensions which 
have a simpler API.

Christopher Culver