Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Markus Hitter]

Am 20.12.2013 11:04, schrieb Ivan Vučica:
> Yes, Unity comes very close to what I want.
> 
> How well does it integrate with GNUstep?

A few weeks ago I tried with Phillipes' GNUmail package(s) and the
ovservation is, the app works very well on its intended purpose, but
pretty much fights what's already there on all the (non-essential)
"desktop" bits.

- The app icon shows up in the launcher dock, still GNUstep tries to
form its own dock NeXTstep-style.

- GNUmail uses neither an in-window menu nor the global one, the
provided menu in a separate window often gets focus wrong, sometimes
these menus even jump upwards when releasing the mouse button.
Apparently there's some disagreement about screen size, sometimes the
size of the menu bar is taken into account, sometimes not. And why, the
heck, does a menu reorder its position on mouse release? Looks like
overengineering.

- Some of the menu entries are visible, but of no use when using a
single GNUstep app. For example services.

> BTW, I found Unity lovely for personal use, but too annoying for use 
> at work. My journey has taken me to Cinnamon. It's the small things 
> that annoy me. Maybe I can avoid that, and provide a better WM and DE
> for use case of "running GNUstep-based apps".
> 
> Oh, and while I think the "nice" and integrated way to do it is 
> through DbusMenu, let me express my ... disappointment in
> assumptions Canonical made when writing it and documenting it.
> Assumptions being "everyone loves GTK or Qt, if not then glib, if not
> then is very familiar with DBUS and needs no debugging tools from us
> such as a standalone menu viewer".

To my observation, Canonical doesn't care much about which technology
you use as long as the result gives a smooth user experience. And they
have clearly non-technical users in mind, the ones who expect things to
just work and have never heard of a compiler or what "DBUS" is.

> And it also cannot and won't support the use case of adding NSViews 
> into menus.

What gives you this assumption? Because it's not there, yet? Expecting
Canonical developers to integrate some exotic and rarely used
applications is a bit too much, IMHO. More likely, they're not even
aware GNUstep exists.

I see no fundamental problem to improve integration. A first step and
probably the most important step would be to remove these fights,
accepting what's there. For example, remove/disable the NeXTstep-style
dock in case there's another application launcher already. KDE
integrates nicely, apparently doors are open for non-Gnome applications.


Markus

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