Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Graphos GNUstep and Tablet interface

I have acquired a Thinkpad X41 Tablet and worked quite a bit on it making it usable and then installing Linux and of course GNUstep on it. The original battery was dead and the compatible replacement I got is bigger, it works very well, but makes the device unbalanced.

Anyway, my interest about it how usable GNUstep applications would be and especially Graphos, its (and my) drawing application.

Using the interface in Tablet mode is different: the stylus is very precise and allows clicking by pointing the tip and a second button is also possible. However, contrary to the mouse use, the keyboard is folded so no keyboard modifiers are possible. Furthermore GNUstep has no on-screen keyboard so typing is not possible.

The classic OpenStep-style Menus work exceedingly well with a touch interface:the menus are easy to click and teared-out they remain like palettes, making toolbars not necessary.
This is a good start!

However, Graphos was not easy to use: aside from typing text, with no keyboard, several components requried typing (e.g. inserting Line Width).
I worked on the interface so that all these elements also had a clickable interface (e.g. Stepper Arrows). Duplicating certain items available in context-menus in regular menus, which can be detached, provided also an enhancements.
Standard items like the color wheel already work very well


Drawing on the screen is definitely very precise and convenient. Stay tuned for the upcoming release!

Thursday, July 12, 2018

DataBasin + DataBasinKit 1.0 released

A new release (1.0) for DataBasin and its framework DataBasinKit is out!

This release provides lots of news, most of the enhancements coming from the framework and exposed by the GUI:
  • Update login endpoint to login.salesforce.com (back again!)
  • Implement retrieve (get fields from a list of IDs, natively)
  • Support nillable fields on create
  • save HTML tables and pseudo-XLS in HTML-typed formats
  • Fix cloning of connections in case of threading
  • Implement Typing of fields after describing query elements (DBSFDataTypes)

DataBasin is a tool to access and work with SalesForce.com. It allows to perform queries remotely, export and import data, inspect single records and describe objects. DataBasinKit is its underlying framework which implements the APIs in Objective-C. Works on GNUstep (major Unix variants and MinGW on windows) and natively on macOS.