ANN: GNUstep application "VolumeCore"

[Julian Mayer]

hello all

inspired by my recent positive experience with GNUstep i decided to try to port 
some of my MIT-licensed Cocoa code to GNUstep. 
i'm not sure if any of those apps which are feasible to port to GNUstep are 
useful per se, but they should help identify problems in GNUstep.

The first ported application is "VolumeCore", an application for realtime (2D 
or 3D) visualization of volumetric data.

you can get the GNUstep compatible code from here, don't mind the Mac binary 
being in the same archive:
http://www.corecode.at/downloads_stuff/VolumeCore.zip

minimal info about the app is here:
http://www.corecode.at/miscstuff/index2.html

there is some information including screenshots (of the Mac version) here - but 
in german:
http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/courses/Visualisierung/2008-2009/Beispiel1/Mayer/Web-Site/Introduction.html


you will need GNUstep trunk and the patch attached to issue #34924 to run the 
application.


"new" issues that were encountered during porting of the app, i've more or less 
worked around all of these except #34924 which needs the patch:
 #34927 NSOpenGLView subclasses only work when added as "custom view" to the 
NIB file
 #34926 -[NSPanel setFloatingPanel:YES] has no effect
 #34924 NSOpenGLView bugged: sends "reshape" message before OpenGL is ready and 
before "prepareOpenGL" has been called
 #34923 nib loading problem: wrong NSPopupButton item by selected [sic]
 #34914 TRUE / FALSE not defined
 #34913 AppKit.h fails to include NSColorSpace.h

additional issues encountered:
  #34445 gnustep-make doesn't merge XXXInfo.plist items if the file resides in 
a subdir
  * the following NSData category doesn't work on gnustep 
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?NSDataPlusBzip
  * gnustep doesn't support the methods in the NSAnimatablePropertyContainer 
protocol, namely - (id)animator
  * the app and document icons won't show up because gnustep is not compatible 
with cocoa-style info.plists containing  <key>CFBundleIconFile</key>     
<string>${PRODUCT_NAME}.icns</string>
  * gnustep doesn't show the Credits.rtf file in the standard about panel
  * its impossible to operate the application on a touchpad (without buttons), 
right clicking on a point in the transfer function brings up the contextual 
menu (two fingers), but you can't actually select anything from the contextual 
menu because lifting one of the fingers to move the cursor closes the 
contextual menu. perhaps this is a general limitation with gnustep right click 
invoked contextual menus and apple style buttonless-touchpads?

bye, julian

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