Monday, July 02, 2007

Spin, spider, spin

Hard work in the past month of a couple of programmers brought a rendering engine and a browser for GNUstep a step closer! Currently most of the limitations SimpleWebKit had compared to myStep are solved! Quite a bit of debugging went into Vespucci too as it is being refactored in a document-based application capable of displaying multiple pages at the same time. Equally merit has to go to Richard who patiently helped to improve GNUstep's core to handle URLs and the HTTP streams. Thus the text you seen in the screenshot is actually downloaded from the Web, not just a mere static string. Although several problems still remain, you may notice that there is lready some font rendering and that the Horizontal Rule is rendered correctly!

The keenest of you may have noticed another detail! The whole application is running on Microsoft Windows! The build process needs to be manually tweaked, but a working executable is possible. It works worse than on Unix though: images represent a problem.

I was really eager to display our progress, but held it back a bit until some details were solved.