Re: Extremely poor quality of GNUStep applications

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Am 21.04.2011 um 19:43 schrieb Ivan Vučica:

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 16:58, Zhang Weiwu, Beijing <zhangweiwu@realss.com> wrote:

You are right these are strange applications, I verified by doing a google search and count number of results. But I do not intend do a selection for allegation, I do it the way many users normally do, that is to browse the repository and see which one's description or name interests me. Slideshow is a very obvious name calling for attention compare to LaternaMagica, a +5 on marketing.

Sounds to me like we need a GNUstep-centric end-user oriented app browser… something like a GNUstep Software Index, but perhaps a more graphical, desktop app with a single-click fetch-source-configure-make-makeinstall? For any platform? :-)

Yes, why not?

You can read the SWI contents from 

http://www.gnustep.org/softwareindex/plist.php

as a Property List (NSArray arrayWithContentsOfURL) and display / filter / search

it in a convenient way (NSTableView). Double-Clicking could take the URL and

load the files (NSURLConnection)...

Should not be very complex. Volunteers?

Maybe even a New And Improved Name™. Something like… GNUstep App Store. Or maybe not :-)

Well, although we mostly discuss the .app extension, there are other bundle file name suffixes :)

BTW: before Apple introduced their App Store, the Apple-Menu did show a menu item "Software...".

This just did open a Web page in the browser to display a list of Apple endorsed software.

Now, this link has been replaced to open the AppStore app.

So the "App Store" is just a dedicated Browser for specific Web content that was available before...

Since our "Browser" is called "Vespucci", we could find a name going in a

similar direction. Named after Someone/thing who provides many useful things...

Some (not filtered) ideas:

* Warehouse.app

* Horreum.app (Latin)

* Fugger.app (14th century trade imperium, Germany)

* ACME.app

* Everything.app

...

Who takes the soccer ball to keep it rolling?

Nah, I'm just kidding. It would be excellent if someone were to dig into it; current distribution-specific repositories are great for other software, but GNUstep software is under-maintained. Except maybe on, from what everyone keeps saying, FreeBSD. :-)

I think the key point is now coming to the surface:

Since I think we will never have a single "application project", we need some sort

of well maintained "App distributions" which have a quality gate and cherry pick

all the good apps out there. Etoile and GAP are such "productivity and user

experience" projects and SWI is a techical tool to support this (probably not the

best one, but better than none - and see above)...

Nikolaus