GWorkspace 0.9.3

New Year's Eve Edition: GWorkspace 0.9.3 released!

GNUstep's workspace got plenty of attention, fixes and improvements, here a summary:

• viewer preferences and status are now stored reliably (you may need to delete your old defaults)
• file operation now work concurrently as they should
• file operations can be paused/resumed more easily and reliably
  - many memory leaks related to file operations fixed! Less bloating during usage
  - fixes for clang/libobjc2 runtime
  - improved host-name setting (previously, on some machines localhost was used)
  - Recycler may unmount volumes now
  - Fixes and performance increases with browser drawing
  - improvements in File operations errors (permissions, etc)
  - fixes when renaming files without permissions
  - further 64bit and portability fixes

NOTE: you may need to delete your current defaults (type "defaults delete GWorkspace") for the new viewer status saving to work correctly

GWorkspace 0.9.2

 pleased to announce the new release of the GNUstep Workspace application.

This is mainly a bug fix, stability and improvement release.

• updated to current APIs and changes to NSUInteger, NSInteger and CGFloat
• thanks to the above, improved 64bit support
• improved BSD support
• improved localizations and capability to localize better in the future
• Fix logout timer
• improved handling of Recycler and other daemons on logout
• MDKit and MDFinder improvements, although problems on some setups remain
• TabbedShelf crash fixes
• memory leaks fixed as detected by the clang static analyzer

Thanks to the many who tested and contributed fixes, first of all Sebastian Reitenbach.

GWorkspace with the Sleek theme

GWorkspace 0.8.8 released

GWorkspace 0.8.8 is out! Many thanks to all those who helped with testing or contributed with patches.

GWorkspace is GNUstep's standard workspace manager.

Among the improvements:

• the GWMetadata subproject is now controlled by a configure option. This means
  that sqlite is no longer a hard dependency if live folders and search
  functionality is not desired. It also means that if selected, it will be really
  configured, built and installed (up to now it was manual).
• portability issues fixed (SPARC crashes, HURD constants)
• builds on Windows (MinGW)
• clean-ups and updates in the build system
• extensive warning fixing and code clean-up (like header imports)
• use standard classes and functions (NSProgressIndicator, info panel...)
• improved terminal services interface and interaction
• improvements with the detection of optional PDFkit for the PDF contents inspector

The compulsory screenshot shows GWorkspace running with the Neos theme from GAP.

The GNU Workspace

Thanks to the continuous improvement by the HURD team and thanks to a nice hacking evening with Matt Rice, quite some improvement was done on GNUstep with HURD. I was already able to have some rough results years ago, but then for a long time everything was unusably broken.

The only major thing to do was to set the global default NSPortIsMessagePort to NO.

In the screenshot we can see a GNU Workspace: done with GNUstep on GNU/Hurd.
GWorkspace is running, the upcoming FTP 0.2 can be seen too and it works well, meanign that distributed objects do work. Terminal.app works pretty fine as does the Rich text editor Ink. Not seen here, but ProjectCenter and Gorm do work too.

Cool is the front most application: Vespucci, the GAP browser which has at its core SimpleWebKit, runs too and loads an URL. This means that sockets, port, and rendering do work on Hurd well enough! Although still quite primitive, a browser on Hurd...

I have noticed some instabilities, with some applications starting up twice or closing and I suspect it is due to the applications not correctly registering with the daemons or with their ports dying.