LaternaMagica 0.4

LaternaMagica 0.4 got released.


The Image viewer and slideshow tool for GNUstep (and your Macintosh).

Enjoy better navigation, keyboard shortcuts and better mass-exporting tool Enjoy it on more platforms too.

FTP 0.3 Released

FTP 0.3 got finally a release! Many small fixes in the build system, better portability and updates.

You can see it in the screenshot running on Windows 7 with the native windows theme!

GWorkspace dock

Now really transparent (if your backend supports it...)

DataBasin 0.4

0.4 is out!

Select Identify: Execute iteratively selects with given Ids or Unique Identifiers (no more Excel connector for this chore)

Select Http or Https as a preference for your connection (and it even works... http had a workaround due to sfdc stubborness which is now enabled only when necessary)

DataBasin at GAP

Neos 0.1 theme for GNUstep

Finally, the first official 0.1 release of the Neos theme. The theme contains now all the icons for the new special folders handled by GWorkspace, following thus the enhancements of the standard theme. You need both the latest GWorkspace and Base for all of them to appear properly.

Use the GNUstep filesystem layout (with the standard /usr/GNUstep or even / as a prefix) for maximum enjoyment. FHS has no real reason in a full GNUstep environment, in my opinion it should not be the default, it should just exist to ease people wanting to install one or two application in another environment.

Name your folders Documents, Images, Music, Downloads.

To have in idea of the look, check my past blog posts and you will see its evolution.

The end of an Aera

Jobs died. Now He was not only the father of the Macintosh, the iPod, iPhone and the iPad. he was also the father of NeXT and thus our guide too, our uncle or step-father.
He surely left a trace in computing. Let us keep his spirit alive in GNUstep

GWorkspace 0.9.0

GWorkspace 0.9.0 is out.

Custom icons for special folders (System, Library, Images, Music, Documents, Downloads, Desktop). Themable.

Volume recognition ported or improved on NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD.

Many fixes in the build system, crash & security fixes.

OresmeKit: plotting two functions

OresmeKit now is capable of plotting two function each against the other in its Cartesian view.

I ported OresmeKit and its examples to the Mac without any major effort, as expected.

Oresme, plotting for GNUstep

Parabola

I started creating OresmeKit, a plotting and charting framework for Objective-C, GNUstep (and Cocoa/Mac). I had the idea since quite some time, but finally started working on it. I know others had sketches on the subject too, but at the end one does need to start somewhere. The Kit will offer custom Views to be embedded inside your application to plot data. The goal is to have simple setup possible. Plotting is a complex art which can be tweaked quite a bit and which can lead to interesting mathematical computations, but let's start with something simple and easily usable, or the design will never go beyond the drawing board.

sinc(x)

The first component is a Cartesian plotting: two X and Y array need to be provided for abscissa and ordinata values. The view can be set to display different X/Y ranges, the Quadrant can be selected and a "centered" mode is available to automatically set the Origo in the center. The View live-resizes and the plot colors can be set. Currently there are no optimizations of any kind, but for simple graphs it works quite well, as the example application shows. Along with the Framework I develop and release also examples which serve the dual-purpose of testing the Kit and providing a starting point for other developers who want to use OresmeKit.

In the screenshots, the example application plotting a parabola  and the plot of the sinc(x) function.


Why OresmeKit? In honour of Nicolas Oresme the antique philosopher who thought about coordinates long before Cartesius. Because Cartesius was too predictable as a name and too tied to X-Y plotting, while OresmeKit shall support more chart types in the future. What's next? I plan on adding some more features to the Cartesian drawing view first. Then typical charting views: bars, lines, pies... At some point some optimization and computation will be available, since otherwise plotting of large datasets will be unbearably slow.

OresmeKit and its examples are available in GAP and are yet unreleased, check the CVS repository.

DataBasin 0.3

DataBasin 0.3 released!

New object inspector, bug fixes, improved character encoding...

DataBasin at GAP

GMastermind running on Macintosh

During the weekend, I rewrote the whole graphics core of GMastermind to use NSBezierPaths instead of PS operations. Furthermore it uses a gorm file to create the menus and instantiate the application Controller.

With these changes, a port of the code to Cocoa is possible! The screenshot shows the game running on my iBook with 100% the same code base of GNUstep.

GMastermind, LapisPuzzle, Sudoku, GMines released

Some of the applications given by Marko Riedel to the care of the GNUstep Application Project were released today:
GMastermind
Sudoku
GMines

Furthermore, LapisPuzzle was released too.

These are maintenace releases which make the application work on current gnustep, fix bugs, improve memory handling and improve porting to different platforms, including windows.

Many thanks to the original author Marko Riedel who helped the code not fall into oblivion and Sebastian Reitenbach whose idea was to import the apps and who helped fix them.

GNUstep on PowerPC

I got a first-generation iBook, those cute tangerine clamshells. Already owning a clamshell iBook, the lime SE version, which runs MacOS Panther, this one had to run GNUstep. I installed Debian/ppc, installed GNUstep and about everything seems to work quite smoothly, I see no extra problems compared to x86.
You can see a busy desktop exported to a bigger display.

GMines 0.2

GMines 0.2, the GNUstep version of the mine field / minesweeper game, got released. It is the first of several applications written by Marko Riedel that were salvaged and subsequently updated and bug-fixed by the GNUstep Application Project.

GMines on GAP.

BatteryMonitor supports NetBSD

BatteryMonitor for GNUstep now has support for NetBSD acpi too now! Support languished because decent acpi support in NetBSD is relatively recent and reading it requires checking a property list (which is of course more complex, but at least consistent and clean compared to the maze of files linux provides). To manipulate it libprop sports handy functions, yet I always had some problems here and there, until I realized something very cool. Property lists are familiar to GNUstep and Cocoa users.
char * prop_dictionary_externalize(prop_dictionary_t dict);
Exports fully-fledged XML property list compatible with GNUstep plists, not just something similar. Thus it is a matter of using
-[NSString propertyList]
to get a dictionary and manipulate it with obj-c iterators, which is much more convenient than the equivalent C function provided by libprop.

Support is still quite rough and, for example, only the first battery is checked. I have only one NetBSD laptop and I don't know how NetBSD shields the results from BIOS idiosyncrasies I experienced on Linux (watt-hour and ampere-hour usage and orthogonality for example). But it is already very nice!

Battery Monitor now on OpenBSD

The battery monitor for GNUstep of the GAP project, has now basic battery information support by accessing the APM/ACPI driver. Advanced cell information supplied by ACPI is still missing. In any case at least I can see how much juice my OpenBSD laptop has left...

(Tested on my Dell Latitude C600, as always with APM and APCI, your luck with other laptops may vary depending on BIOS information and Kernel support)

Marko Riedel's apps now in GAP

Some applications recently lost their home, thus Sebasitan Reitenbach, of OpenBSD packages fame, asked if GAP could find a new place for them.
Marko Riedel published several small applications in the past year: games, preview utilities... these need patches to continue working with newer GNUstep versions and to fix bugs. For a packager, it is more convenient to have a stable place from where to retrieve everything.

Mr. Riedel gave us the authorisation to import the applications.

Sudoku and GMines are already part of the repository and have been brought up-to-date and work again smoothly.

Jigsaw puzzle is on its way.

I wonder what we should do with Yap, the a2ps front-end. The image viewing capabilities are well covered by PRICE and LaternaMagica, the PDF viewing is handled by GSPdf in the same way through ghostscript. The only value added would be the pretty printing through a2ps. Does anybody use this and is it worth investing time to fix YAP ?

DataBasin Object Inspector sorting

The fields are now sortable by Label and Developer Name. A little feature that was sorely needed within orgs with almost 500 fields per object!

This feature is currently not available in GNUstep.

DataBasin, Objective-C portable data access tool.

DataBasin: object inspection

DataBasin now sports an Object Inspector which works in the easiest way possible: insert a SalesForce.com ID: DataBasin will try to attempt do determine the object type, automatically describe it and finally load the data.

How many times did you have the need to quickly inspect an Object of which you got the ID in an exception email? Or how many times did you have to inspect the value of a field not visible on the layout?

This new feature required some extension to the underlying API of DB: the Soap class now has an identifier method which looks for an ID in all objects returned by the Describe Global in the attempt to identify the object it comes from.

The coolest addition however is in the DBSObject class itself: it is capable of loading or refreshing the values of a set of fields or of all known fields. And behold, a finesse: when loading the value of all fields, the queries will be split into executable queries without reaching the maximum SOQL size of 10K chars, as opposed to Apex Explorer which chokes if you select all fields of a very big object.

GWorkspace and BSDs

GWorkspace is now more portable: the desktop feature and its mounted volume display now should work reliably not only on Linux but also on most BSDs and derivatives. GWorkspace needs to check which volumes are mounted. Comparing it with a list configured in SystemPreferences the user can see the mounted devices on the desktop.

All started by a patch offered by Sebastian, where a FreeBSD feature was used on OpenBSD. The whole code was a maze which attempted to parse the "mount" output. I first fixed it and also found security holes which were rapidly amended.

The final solution however has been to remove the parsing code and use getmntinfo() where available and maintain only one fall-back mechanism, the parsing of /etc/mtab as to maintain Linux compatibility.

The question on how to support GNU/HURD remains open though. I'd love to have it working in a clean way. However, it lacks /etc/mtab and even the hackish solution to parse mount is not feasible since it returns valid content only for Linux.

Solaris support needs to be verified too.

Constructive input appreciated.

GNUstep's Desktop

Who says we don't have a desktop? ;)
Look at the screenshot. NSWorkspace now identifies the Desktop as a special folder and associates it with an icon. The icon is new too.

Also the Music folder is now recognized as a special folder and has its cool new icon too.

Maybe that wasn't a blog post you all expected about a complete GNUstep desktop :)

With this last additions, the addition of special folders to NSWorkspace is quite complete. Images, Documents, Downloads, Music and Desktop are recognized as special folders in the user home. The user home itself had already a special icon since a long time. Regarding system-wide folders, the "System" and the "Library" folder have its icons, if they applicable for the used file system layout.

These icons are all theme-able too, each Theme can customize them.

ProjectCenter 0.6.0

ProjectCenter, GNUstep's IDE, equivalent of ProjectBuilder / XCode was released in version 0.6.0.

• New project format, bundle-based, user information is separated from project information: this makes collaboration of different people easier with CVS/SVN/etc
• Editor undo support
• Support for setting the project Installation domain
• Improved gnustep-make 2.x support in both the project itself as in the project generation
• integrated debugger
• first integration between ProjectCenter and Gorm regarding
• improved usage and run on Windows
• uncountable bug fixes (in syntax highlighting, detachable editors, portability...)
  

Happy coding!

ProjectCenter page.

DataBasin 0.2

DataBasin v 0.2 was released, the free software, open source tool for working with Salesforce.com.

The core library was enhanced and new features were added.

Read more and download it from the DataBasin homepage.

New Workspace icons

NSWorkspace handles now a new set of icons reserved for special folders, similar to what Apples Finder always did or what Windows does. Up to now the root icon and the user home were special.
I designed and added a new cache-based handling to NSWorkspace for the icons depicting the user's Documents, Images and Downloads. For the the System folder a new icon is associated where applicable, since it doesn't make sense in certain Layout. The Library icon will associated with the Library folder in all Domains (System, Network, Local).

GWorkspace has been adapted to display these icons and it is the primary goal. Check the screenshot and spot them! However since the Icons and the Code are supplied by GNUstep core they will be available for alternative Workspace and File Managers or for any application which asks the Workspace for the icons to display.

If you want to try them out, you need the SVN trunk version of GWorkspace, gui and base. The latter is needed because NSPathUtilities needed some tweaking.

The icons are for the default theme currently. I plan to update other themes soon.

bilinear filtering

Finally PRICE got proper Bilinear filtering.

This was surely long due! The previous linear h+v filter was little more than a quick hack.

Bilinear filtering is quick, good and quite sharp and works well with scaling between the 50% and the 150% range. It is quite good when downscaling while upscaling beyond a certain range surely has better algorithms.

LaternaMagica and its export tool with automatic constraining will benefit from this new filter too.

Internet module for SystemPreferences

I created a new System Preference Module called Internet. It is intended to hold system-wide configurations for Internet applications, a bit like Macintosh had up to version 10.2 (or, for that matter, even the older System 7.5 up to 9... or SGI Irix IndigoMagic...).

Currently, the preference implemented is the default browser selection (used by NSWorkspace when it has to open URLs). The registered browsers are presented, they are set immediately on selection and the corresponding application icon is conveniently displayed.

Currently the selection of browsers is essentially limited to Vespucci and SWK's test-bed SWK Browser. Browser wrappers are not supported because they are unable to register with NSWorkspace correctly as they can't open URLs.

Browsing GNUstep documentation

A quick update! Vespucci and SWK are now able to display our GNUstep documentation. Links and frames do work now much better now. This required an patient debugging in URL management.
This is a milestone in the usage of SWK and shows that it can be already very useful as an embedded view.

Vespucci and SWK news update

It has been quite some time since the last post here. My coding efforts were and are scattered among the various GAP applications. Vespucci has lately received most of the attention. The window and document controllers were rewritten to follow more the NSDocument and NSDocumentController philosophy. The major benefit is that some smaller features that worked only on Mac now work well also on GNUstep.
The recent Document list now works, which is handy for local files. Opening URLs fron NSWorkspace works more reliably.
During the restructuring, I added the classic back and forward buttons. Thanks to suggestions of Wolfgang Lux now both the buttons and the menu entries are validating and disable/enable themselves.

Incidentally, the screenshot of Vespucci running on GNUstep is also on HURD! The mac screenshot shows the portability and shows that on Cocoa SWK has rough table support through NSTextTable.

Native Print Preview in GNUstep

The upcoming GSPdf version can be used seamlessly to do Print Preview in GNUstep. The provision to do that has long been in GNUstep's printing code, but no application exploited it.

GSPdf is undergoing quite some restructuring and is now a true document-based application. This allows it to register properly for the post script viewing task. Activationg GhostScript's anti-aliasing is supported too (look at the screenshot, where Graphos itself is running without).

GSPdf is an interface to ghostscript as gv is, so the displayed quality should remain the same.

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.

First release of DataBasin

I'm pleased to announce the first release of DataBasin, a tool which allows to access Data on SalesForce.com using its WebService APIs. Core part of the tool is the API implementation in Objective-C, which uses the GNUstep WebServices for the low-level interaction.

The API implementation is designed to be reusable in other application and is LGPL'd.

Basic functionalities like Query, Insert and Delete are implemented (and of course log-in!) but the tool contains many rough parts, like the CVS importer/exporter so production use is not yet recommended.

As far as I know this is the only open source library for Salesforce.com, at least in Objective-C.

In the screenshot DataBasin running on Debian GNU/Linux.

A big thanks to many friends who helped me implementing the API and debugging the SOAP Calls. First of all Richard Frith-MacDonald who extended the GSWS to support SOAP in the first place. Then two colleagues, Andrea Rosa and Enrico Murru who helped track down many bugs.

Graphos released

Today is my birthday and I am pleased to finally release Graphos 0.1!

Graphos is a new version of GDraw I was working over the past few years, read past blog entries about it. It is a vector drawing application for GNUstep.

Graphos is available from the GNUstep Application Project.

ProjectCenter has now Undo

I made a second attempt in implementing Undo support for ProjectCenter (GNUstep's IDE) I was much more successful thanks to Wolfgang's suggestions.

ProjectCenter now supports Undo in the Editor, both if it is docked inside the project window or if it is standalone. A few rough edges remain, but it appears to be functional and usable.

Finally! A small feature I was missing since a long time.

Battery Monitor 0.5

I released Battery Monitor 0.5 for GNUstep. This version includes some bug fixes and most importantly it supports the ACPI information in the /sys filesystem available on the more recent Linux kernels (as compared to /proc).

I noticed that for some ACPI implementation information is written in both places, but for some it is only in /sys so BatteryMonitor wasn't able to find a battery.

Currently /proc is still available as a fall-back if no battery is found in /sys, but I plan to deprecate and remove it in the future.

Batmon is available as usual in GAP.

Terminal 0.9.7

I released Terminal 0.9.7.

This version is a maintenance release that guarantees compilation again on the most recent GNUstep release. This release contains code clean-up, fixes of recent and long-standing warnings and some smaller bug fixes.

Sources are available at Terminal's page in the GNUstep Application Project.

Sleek is back

I once created a color scheme for the "Color Schemes" preference module I too created long ago.

However, the Color Schemes module was deprecated (it still exists, but it is not installed by default) since we have the new Theme module and the Theme Engine in GNUstep. Themes have all the capabilities of the old Color schemes, plus of course new features.

Since I apparently had some faithful users of the old scheme, I took the effort to remake it as a Theme and also tweak some more details. It is already better than the old one. but other details can be tweaked and improved as a theme. However it is almost ready for a 0.1 release!

I hope the new theme will enjoy the same popularity that the old scheme had!

The appearance of GNUstep gets lighter, it looses much of the 3d accent. Somebody may call it more modern.

DataBasin gets Update and a new inspector

DataBasin, the SOAP data access tool for Salesforce of the GNUstep Application Project, got new features! Check the screenshot.

The SOAP layer was enriched with the update call. To perform an update the steps are identical to an Insert and the already existing object describe is use to retrieve the list of available objects. Currently, as with Insert, the CSV column titles need to match exactly the Salesforce fields.

Also, DataBasin got a new inspector about the user properties retrieved during login. These informations can be handy during development, like the ID of the Org, the User, its profile and role. They are exposed in Output-only fields with support for copy-paste to other applications

Grr working on windows

Grr now works under Windows! Another proof of GNUstep's versatility.

Screenshot attached, with the upcoming native WindowsUXTheme. Note the scrollbars, checkboxes, native in-window menus, native window-decorations for windows and panels...

Graphos has undo...

Graphos (GAP Vector editor) got undo support. Add/remove shapes (that worked already) and proper undo of moving, inspecting and editing shapes.

This required implementing shallow vs. deep copy of the objects, but the deep copy needs to be smart about which references are indeed duplicated and which not... A bit of fun programming!

LaternaMagica v0.2

Laterna Magica v0.2 is out! New features are more keyboard short-cuts, JPEG saving and better in-window menus support (NSWindow95Style). The latter feature delayed release another bit of this long-due release, but it works great.

The attached screenshot shows LaternaMagica running on windows using the experimental WinUXTheme which draws several controls native including in-window menus. Note how the menu is attached to the main application window but not to the image window.

LaternaMagica home page

Native theming on Windows progress

Scrollbars now draw properly on Windows using the native WinUXTheme, sizing and placing is correct.

In the screenshot you can see Graphos running with the current version of the native windows theme.

Graphos: vector Drawing application for GNUstep

A long time ago 10 years now, Enrico Sersale began to work on a very interesting and promising application: GDraw. A vector drawing application for GNUstep. Its spline drawing capabilities and document-based design were very advanced for those early days of GNUstep.

A long time passed, there were no further developments and the application bitrotted, starting not to compile any more under GNUstep or not working properly in any case.

I decided to make GDraw come back from the ashes under the name of Graphos. It took me a lot of work to bring it up-to-date.

From a user perspective little has changed, as a kind of tribute to the original work I left the user-interface essentially as-is, planning to change and enhance it only in the next release. However when the application was written, Gorm was in its infancy so for example the Menus were hard-coded. Now they are done properly in Gorm.

All drawing operations were PostScript based, I converted them to use NSBezierPath, this makes the application portable to Macintosh and Cocoa, as the attached screenshot testifies.

I wanted then to bug-.fix and complete some of the existing functions, The when I tried to complete the implementation of the "Box" tool, I found out that the architecture was unclear and limited making it next to impossible to continue.

The upcoming task was thus an incremental re-factoring of the application core. The code itself was almost untouched, but a clearer distinction was formed between Editors and Objects (improving also the file format, making it Editor independent). Object inheritance permits now easier extension and organization of the code.

Now Graphos works on Mac and GNUstep almost like its predecessor GDraw, I intend to make a preliminary release soon and then evolve its missing functions and perform more refactoring.

The file format changed only little and Graphos is able to read GDraw files (but not the opposite) due to a better Editor/Object distinction.

Almost a tribute to a ghost from the past, I hope Enrico will appreciate the efforts.

As usual, the application is part of GAP, the GNUstep Application Project where it finds its new home.

Theme module for SystemPreferences

I implemented a new preference module for System Preferences. It allows the selection of the preferred theme system-wide for the current user (NSGlobalDefault GSTheme)

This is finally the way an end-user should set his preferred theme, since currently either the command line was needed (defaults write) or only per-application setting was possible.

The module uses themes for GSTheme and they can be created with thematic. It displays a short description, the author, if available the version, the icon and a small theme preview. Since it would be almost impossible to do a preview in a subview, each bundle can carry an image of its preview.

The user can "Apply" the theme which means essentially to set the selected theme to the SystemPreferences application as a sort of preview or to Save, which writes the default permanently.

In the attached screenshot, you can see that the "ThinkDark" theme is applied temporarily and that the user is inspecting the Neos theme. The rest of the system however still runs the standard theme.

Thanks to the dynamic loading capabilities of GSTheme, after saving the theme all application get the new theme immediately.

The Themes module supersedes the Color Schemes control panel which is thus now no longer built and installed by default, although it remains available.

System Preferences 1.1.0 was thus released, combining some other minor code and makefile improvements already present

Up-to-date themes are present in the GAP CVS repository, they will be re-released soon.

DataBasin and deletion of Salesforce records

I implemented delete in the Salesforce.com API Layer (DBSoap) of DataBasin.

The screenshot shows DataBasin running on the Mac, natively built in Xcode.

Delete is capable of deleting an array of records, on top of this I implemented a convenient function: QuickDelete. Just enter a Saleforce.com ID and delete it.

Full handling of the error results is still missing, currently only the verbose message are retrieved. For the QuickDelete an error gets conveniently displayed as if it were an exception in a small scrollable panel.

Grr: RSS to go on GNUstep

Guenther Noack, the Author of Grr, donated the appreciated RSS Reader and its Framework RSSKit to the GNUstep Application Project some time ago, since he had no time to maintain it any more. I will not promise anything, but as it is usual for GAP projects we try hard to make our programs compatible.

Thus Grr got a general make up of crash fixes, makefile fixes and warning fixes. Then an extensive work of removing forward declaration of Protocols was done so that compilation on gcc 29.5 is now possible, expanding the list of platforms where to run Grr on.

I compiled and ported Grr to the MIPS based Letux 400 netbook as can be seen in the screenshot. Grr uns perfectly and thus tracking RSS on the small device is now smooth as butter. RSS everywhere with you!

OpenOffice frustration

Subtitle: Why OpenSource continues to fail in many sectors.

Now. this is going to be a negative post full of criticism. Beware and decide if you want to stop reading. A rant.

A premise: I have mainly two uses of Open Source: the first is personal. That means I do stuff for myself. Or maybe I use it with my development of Open Source. That means I use it within a clean environment. Mostly I use developer tools but also Office and Graphics tool. But it is easy, I send material to a colleague that means he is most probably using the same thing.

The real problem is the second use: real business. Here things immediately take another turn. There are no excuses. My main rant is against OpenOffice and MS Office incompatibility. There are no excuses possible!

The new shiny 3.1.1 is out there and once again I give it a try. It is so appealing to have an alternative. An alternative which I can also use on Linux, on BSD or on Solaris. And on Windows of course. I notice many improvements, the applications on Windows XP looks good. I am pleased that OO did not yet follow the terrible "new MS style without menu bars and big fancy icons". I know it will happen, but for now it is fine.

But what is the real world task I need to solve? Take a file from a colleague, work on it, give it back. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

I take a power point file, modify it, give it back.

The file is ruined, the graphic images are broken. Things gets misplaced, connectors are broken...

The verdict is just one: OpenOffice is unusable in the real world. So sorry to say that. 

I reported a similar bug in Word documents about a year ago. The comments were more or less useless. Like "duplicate" or "we are different". Now indeed, there are a lot of bugs about similar problems posted. With that philosophy you can't go far with applications that need to inter-operate.

Also, I may note, that OpenOffice clearly dips into MS Office footsteps. It is not a "different" office suite. It is a suite that wants to appeal the MS user. You see it in almost every detail of the user interface. Also, the compatibility is actually high, but not enough. There are no excuses.

Heck, OpenOffice has that small office assistant even! But corrupts diagrams? 

Yet some of the compatibility bugs are there since months, years even. I do not care in this case on how much I can do "within" OpenOffice itself: I am not making a slide presentation for FOSDEM, I am making one for someone else, that someone else will be using MS Office or, in any case, expects that as an exchange format.

Neos: make-up for GNUstep

I released today a first version of Neos, a new theme for GNUstep. It is not yet a definitive release, but perfectly usable. More subtle, with less contrast. Yet I intend to retain the NeXT spirit to the maximum.

I will try to make minor releases which each change I implement, up to a first official release.

The theme is done inside Thematic and also illustrates the progress done on that front, the current Neos version is code-less and consists only in new pixmaps and other point-and-click configurations.

The Neos theme is part of the GAP project and there I created an extra section to collect themes, wallpapers, color schemes to offer an easy way to adapt and customize the GNUstep interface, something which gets often criticized.

In the screenshot, the Gorm document and palette with the new theme.

DataBasin is now able to create records in sfdc

DataBasin is now able to create records in SalesForce.com starting from a CSV file.

First, as shown in the screenshot, the already implemented method describeGlobal retrieves the available objects to insert into. Once the user selects them the CSV file is read and the objects get created. There is no provision yet for mapping the fields, the first line is assumed to contain the field names.

The API implemented by DBSoap is now getting a little more complete step after step. The basic operations of creation and query are already possible.

describeGlobal implemented in DataBasin

I implemented describeGlobal in the DBSoap layer of DataBasin which communicates with salesforce.com. Thus a list of all objects in the system can be queried, standard and custom objects. The return is just an array of strings.

Step after step I am recreating a simple API interface to the salesforce.com Web services in pure Objective-C.

Login manager for GNUstep

After 7 years and 5 months that it was committed to GAP, during which it was more or less dormant, LoginPanel saw a surge in activity again. A first public release is near. With it, the "Desktop Environment" experience will begin right at the beginning.

First, authentication is now possible both with PAM as with a fallback on standard UNIX /etc/passwd files.
Then, the most important work, a session gets started with the execution of the standard .xsession file. Terminating a session gets then correctly all processes killed

I propose something along the lines:

wmaker&
exec openapp GWorkspace

That will make the session dependent on GWorkspace and not WindowMaker, this way the "Logout" command does indeed log the user out.
Also Gregory implemented a way to set a default variable at application startup so that the mini-window doesn't get drawn, this is important both at startup, when no window manager is running, as well as during execution, since loginpanel remains "frozen" in the background.

More informations will come on the GAP website.

GShisen 1.3.0 released

GShisen 1.3.0 is there!

GShisen is a long-existing GNUstep application written by Enrico Sersale many years ago, its claim is to be the first GNUstep game. Unfortunately, as many old application, it did not see any maintenance and updates and started to bitrot.

I decided to overhaul it and import it into the GNUstep Application Project.

The biggest change is that it now uses Gorm files to create the interface instead of creating it from code. This means less code to maintain. A new project was created and the makefile is now gnustep make 2.0 compliant.

Once the restructuring was done, the game was ported to both Mac and Windows, as past posts on this blog document, for added fun on any platform. It also of course certifies again the maturity and flexibility of GNUstep on different Platforms. Note that the Mac port is completely native without the need of GNUstep at all.

GSPdf 0.3 released

Version 0.3 GSPdf has been released The main feature is a Preference Panel where the user can select the GhostScript binary to use. Packagers are still encouraged to set the default path which is correct for the operating system they target to, but now for example multiple instances of GS are easily supported.

GSPdf is a PDF and PostScript viewer for GNUstep, it is a backend to GhostScript.

Limited screen real estate

The Letux 400 has a wide-VGA screen, 800x480 pixels. Bright, crisp and well readable, but sure an uncommon format. 800x600 was common for laptops for a long time.
How do standard desktop applications fare on the Netbook? Some just don't fit, but there are several which just work and allow to have a small workspace available.

The first screenshot shows that albeit crammed, the Workspace is fine. The panel with the folders could be closed to gain even more space. Behind you can see the Terminal application. Sure, only one can be seen at a time, but it is enough to work.

Then we have the AddressManager showing up in all its glory. Fits tight but fits. A really useful application on a Netbook!






The last image shows the Vespucci browser on the Letux. Works fine.

Note: Screenshots are from applications actually running on the Letux 400, not mock-ups.

GShisen on Windows

Well, after having ported to GShisen to Macintosh I had absolutely get it running on Windows. This requried some minor changs in the code since mingw is not a complete POSIX system.
However, as the screenshot testifies, GNUstep proves once again its portability power. The screenshot also shows the horizontal in-window style menus.

GShisen on the Macintosh

So, after the work of clean-up of GShisen its interface is now created mostly from its Gorm file, including its menu structure and dialog panels. The nice thing is that mostly it was code removal! Everything is not smoother and clearer.

Now, with a clean project I attempted a port to Mac, I redid the whole project in Xcode and the NIB file in InterfaceBuilder, within two hours I had a usable GShien on the Macintosh. A port already existed, but the new NIB-based interface is much smoother and indeed perfectly native. Really amazing at how fast the port is and how ProjectCenter-XCode and Gorm-IB relate side by side. I actually like how clean the GNUstep counterparts are. Setting up the InfoPanel on ProjectCenter is a breeze and it comes out perfect!

Reviving GShisen

There is an application - half forgotten - that claims to be the first GNUstep game: GShisen. It is part of of the large number of programs Enrico Sersale worked on.

The application has its roots 9 years ago and its code, and project is old, although it still works fine.

I intend to make GShisen part of the GNUstep Application Project: development in GNUstep has taken long strides and I want to update GShisen for it: a modern ProjectCenter project and not hand coded files, GORM files for windows but also menus, which were hand coded in main.m! As well as standard ways to show Infopanels, dialogs, etc. Things are so convenient now. The advantage is also that the code size gets smaller!

For the first release, I do not intend to add any new features, the user won't notice the difference.

Stay tuned! (Or check GAP cvs for progress)

GNUstep to go... on MIPS

GNUstep is addictive, so one has to have it always handy... laptops, virtual machines, Windows port are means, but netbooks? The current trend?

The smallest one I found around is the Letux 400. This small nifty thing is light (670g, about 2/3 of the typical Atom netbook) and really small, as an A5 piece of paper. Small enough that the thumbs can reach the touchpad. The display is small, but extremely bright and very crisp. It is perfectly viewable even outside with sunlight, really amazing. Both WiFi as standard LAN networking are present. The nice touch is the MIPS CPU instead of an x86, which, as a seasoned SGI machine user, stirred up my interest. The CPU, of embedded fame, is just passively cooled (which, since the 2GB flash constitutes the solid-state drive, makes it absolutely silent) and consumes little power, I reached more than the stated 4h of operation, getting almost 5h sometimes.

The picture compares the Letux 400 atop of my Compaq EVO notebook. You can also barely see GWorkspace and Vespucci running on it...

The machine comes with a 2.4 series kernel and a custom distribution, which I won't discuss here. Golden Delicious computer, the distributor, sets up a second partition where Debian comes preinstalled and with a script (easy to customize) it is possible to work with chroot in Debian. This is a good setup for the current phases of development, convenient as it uses the standard mipsel distribution.

With the current version of GNUstep, it is possible to install easily the core system and, thanks to the GNUstep Application Project, one can get a small and functional GNUstep environment. The Workspace Manager GWorkspace runs fine as well as Terminal.

Of course I also tried SimpleWebKit and Vespucci on the Letux and, as expected, they work fine and run! It is the foray to a small, portable browser.

The future is bright! Apart from standard GNUstep development, a better kernel (2.6, which is in the work) able to solve some of the glitches present in the SkyTone supplied one, as well as a more optimized Linux distribution instead of the chrooted Debian could provide a really interesting ultra-mobile solution for GNUstep.

A pracitcal use...

Vespucci + SWK are approaching a state where they are of practical use: browsing the GNUstep reference documentation! Some things are still rough, but the latest work on Frames by Nikolaus is very promising.

A browser on HURD

From time to time I check how the status of GNUstep is on GNU/HURD. After all, the goal of GNUstep and the GNUstep Application Project is to provide a complete Workspace or, in current speak, a Desktop Environment.

So, why do not use it on HURD, the crown of the GNU OS? Hurd is a project always in an unkown status, with the menace of changing the microkernel to something unknown, but with nobody taking GNU-Mach to top-notch status.

In any case, the combination of Debian on HURD is pretty interesting and complete and the advantage is that getting a "familiar" environment is relatively easy.

In any case, currently GNUstep on HURD runs pretty reasonable. With pedning limitaitons, the core seems to work, Workspace runs, the Terminal application does work and what is perhaps coolest, the Vespucci browser runs! So this not only proves the portability of gnustep core and simplewebkit, but also gives hope for a decent graphical web browser for Hurd once simplewebkit progresses more.

Bookmarks... and drawing pencils

Bookmarks are maybe the most valuable personal value that gets created by a user with a browser.  Bookmarks are what you miss if you use somebody else's computer or you loose your data for whatever reason.
Just a couple of days before OrobienStep I discussed extensively with Greg a flexible and yet simple bookmark archival strategy for Vespucci. I started implementing it,  then at OrobienStep with Nikolaus I shared the idea, since it would be core for the future to have a shared and exchangeable data model. Exchanging bookmarks from the GNUstep workstation to myStep mobile solutions, to ports to the mac, to netbooks... pretty much essential.
We did some reverse engineering of the Safari bookmark format and it did have similarities to my format, although it looks a bit more quirky and complex, the basic information is the same, so I started adapting my loader to it.
Vespucci is now able to load Safari bookmarks without any modifications and the native format of Vespucci is almost the same, so saved bookmarks can be loaded in Safari again. iSync information  does not get produced by Vespucci and gets lost if previously converted.
I think the result was worth the extra effort.


One note: you can also port over your Safari bookmarks from the Macintosh to GNUstep, but the property list (plist) needs to be converted from XML to the standard format. You can do that with the "Property List Editor" utility supplied by apple, use "ASCII Property List File".
And as an end note... I had some graphic design time as a break from coding time. Laterna Magica and Vespucci enjoy new icons...

OrobienStep '09

The developers departed, the lights have been shut down: OrobienStep has ended. We had a nice developer meeting in Italy, near Bergamo. We started Friday evening and went on to Sunday afternoon. Staying at Hotel Quarti, we had a convenient meeting room equipped with LAN, WLAN, Beamer, flip-chart... Attendees were Fred, Nikolaus, Gerold and of course myself, Riccardo. Gregory was able to communicate through skype and webcamera.

Friday was more a warm-up day. Windows work was a bit halted since the new make from svn busted both my gnustep installations. That overcome, work started well.

We tackled several areas and poor Fred was a bit overbooked since a lot came down to gui and back.

• SimpleWebKit made great strides. Existing bugs with redirect were squashed by Nikolaus, which allows now to visit sites like google or yahoo. Nikolaus worked on Form support too, which got to a reasonable state on Cocoa (sending the data is still buggy) but it still doesn't work on GNUstep
• both SWKBrowser and Vespucci saw work on Bookmarks support
• both SWKBrowser and Vespucci got document editor/viewer type problems fixed on GNUstep and can now correctly do new document and open files from disk
• art backend can now display 16bit images (both on little and big endian machines)
• sparse bugs were fixed which impeded Windows compilation
• several bugs were discovered or analyzed (windows problems with display and keycodes, missing features which cause Bean not to save files correctly, focus problems with gnome

A lot of information was exchanged, ideas discussed... I think everything was quite interesting and if an actual implementation follows it will be great.

We demoed some cool stuff to each other too:

• Nikolaus showed us the evolution on his Macintosh software for the bluetooth Paperium pen+block system
• we played on the Letux 400 system, an extremely small MIPS based netbook
• I demoed DataBasin

All in all, everything was packed and productive. Nice trips to Italian restaurants were in, but unfortunately due to the tight schedule and the cold weather, no sightseeing was possible.

DataBasin, or how to access salesforce.com from Objective-C

After several weeks of work, I can announce my first concrete success: the download of the contact list from the CRM to a CSV file.

On supported platforms, like Java or C#, salesforce.com offers libraries for a convenient access to their APIs (webservice interfaces). For Objective-C and GNUstep of course there is nothing of the kind. Thus I started writing a layer to access the webservices directly using SOAP calls. To be able to write those, I use GNUstep's WebServices framework, which I discovered was still quite rough and incomplete. Richard Frith-MacDonald though promptly debugged it and extended it. Until the first login was possible, a lot of debugging and investigation on the calls was necessary, I was patiently supported by my colleague Andrea Rosa.

Currently the donload means that the Login method completes correctly and returns a valid session, which is then reused to perform the query request and interpret its response. It is a demonstration that the whole concept can work

My intention is to develop DataBasin to be a free Open Source alternative to the DataLoader tool supplied by salesforce.com. Once I reach that goal, I alreayd have further ideas on how to extend it.

DataBasin is part of the GNUstep Application Project and will be released there once ready for prime time.

FTP 0.2 released

Finally, after months of delays and tweaks, FTP 0.2 is out! FTP is the FTP application in GAP for GNUstep and Macintosh.

Externally, few changes can be noticed: a new icon, the correct fixed pitch font in the log window and little more.

Internally, several changes happened though. Two are the main news.

First, the socket core was rewritten not to use file operations: on non-Unix systems sockets may not be files. This change allows, after some additional effort, to run FTP on windows. Thus FTP now runs natively on the Macintosh, runs on GNUstep on unix systems like BSD, Solaris or Linux and now on Windows too.

Second, the data connections are handled in a separate thread, which talks back to the main thread using DO (Distributed Objects). This allows the UI to remain responsive during list and download operations: this wasn't a real issue on the Macintosh, but on GNUstep windows wouldn't even redraw their contents during download, making the progress bar pretty useless. I still do not allow concurrent downloads, since the FTP protocol is not designed for that and it needs some workarounds.

Enjoy! Be sure to have the latest version of GNUstep base, since the DO system contains some fixes which are needed for FTP to work correctly.