Etoile Project Releases Mac-Like Environment 311
pschmied writes "Today the Étoilé Project released v0.2 of its Desktop Environment. Not only does Étoilé share user interface similarities with Mac OS X, Étoilé enjoys some source-level compatibility with Mac OS X as well. Many here undoubtedly remember NeXT, the revolutionary computer / development environment that gave rise to the first Web browser and later became the foundation of Mac OS X. Étoilé uses the FSF's own implementation of the NeXT development environment, GNUstep, making this a close technological relative of OS X. Screenshots and a source tarball are available."
First web browser (Score:2, Interesting)
The want to avoid the GPL (Score:3, Interesting)
Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Menus at the top! (Score:3, Interesting)
There's hacks to work around it of course.
Strategic importance of Etoile (Score:5, Interesting)
If you haven't already done so, I urge you to check out David's Core Object posting. [etoile-project.org] There is some exciting stuff there. Smalltalkers will find it particularly interesting.
Props to the Etoile team! This is even more reason for me to grow my Objective C / Cocoa / GNUStep skills.
-Peter
Re:Menus at the top! (Score:2, Interesting)
Just show the menu bar on both screens with the menus of whatever is the front application on that particular screen.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
GNUStep is reasonably compatible with NextStep which is reasonably compatible with Cocoa. They branched from a common ancestor and happen to be reasonably similar now. All the extra frameworks tossed in to this project looks to be a third fork more than a bridge between the two.
Re:Menus at the top! (Score:2, Interesting)
With Sawfish, I have neither of those downsides. The only thing that now bothers me with Sawfish is that is seems to have lost the ability to focus a window, without bringing it "front", which is common with other recent window managers/desktops. Again, since I multitask, it takes me longer to "copy and paste" from, for example, a log window in a corner of the screen to an email.
Iffy work on next-gen-file-abstraction (Score:3, Interesting)
The discussion of a replacement for the "file" abstraction seems a bit iffy. We've seen this before, many times, and it hasn't worked:
In short: it seems they're improving object serialization. Nice, but hardly revolutionary, and likely to introduce fun problems when interoperating with software relying on it.
Re:Menus at the top! (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't tell you how much I hate tooling around to the top of the screen when I have several applications open on a large monitor. It's bad enough that I have my mousepad sideways (long-axis vertical), because that's the direction that requires the most unnecessary movement:
(1) Click on a button in the application.
(2) Motor the fuck all the way up to the top of the screen, click a menu option.
(3) Voyage the mouse all the way back down to the bottom of the screen where the application window is. Click something.
(4) Trundle the motherfucking mouse all the way back up to the top of the screen. This is getting old.
It also makes multimonitor so much of a pain that it's not worth it for anything but graphics programs (where you can have a fullscreen, non-interactive preview on the 2nd monitor - and you never mouse over there).
The "we don't need stinking maximize" argument for the "zoom" button is exposed as the bullshit it is with this argument for the menus at the top of the screen, isn't it? (the Mactard argument for zoom is that monitors are huge, nobody wants maximized windows - the Mactard argument for menus being at the top of the screen is that monitors are tiny and menus are a waste of valuable space).
I really do like almost every aspect of OSX (typing this on my Mac right now) - except for the menu placement and that the dock doesn't behave more like the Windows taskbar (which is not so good for starting programs - but is infinitely superior for managing programs and windows that are open).
Re:Menus at the top! (Score:2, Interesting)
Except that I now have to move the pointer farther to get to it. Like I said, I trade real estate for motion.
> b) The mouse-movement that the menu costs you is a lot easier than the mouse movement for menus attached to windows - that's the point of putting the menus at the top of the screen.
That's just nonsense, unless ALL windows are opened immediately below the menu bar, and, even then, the per-application menu might be more compact horizontally than the top-of-screen menu. Any window that opens mid-display still has to have its menu accessed at the top of the screen. On a 640x480 Amiga, that was too far, and it's still too far on an 1024x768, or larger, Mac or Linux box.
> (c) If I'm using multiple applications on the same screen (and I'm not using a virtual-desktop, which to be fair I usually do), then I use Exposé to switch between them. It's bound to my 5th mouse button so it works anywhere and it's very quick.
Haven't tried that (have to use the middle of a three-button, I suppose), but if Expose pops up close the current pointer, it would help.
> (d) There are other ways the Mac tries to speed workflow, but to be fair, other systems have extras too, so I'll stick to what you identified...
Could be, but I unless (c) helps, I can't find them.
> You don't have to like the Mac way of doing things, but you ought to try it with a fair mind before criticising it...
We have three in current use (all PPC: two iBooks, since Linux laptop support didn't used to be as good as it is now, and a Mini below the home theater monitor, for casual web browsing and streaming media), so I have tried them. I cannot get a Mac to multitask even as well as the Amiga used to, since the Amiga had fast paging through applications screens, and I cannot find that on the Mac, and it had a "lower window" feature on the windows that made togging through stacks faster since there was not even the need to move from the mouse to the keyboard. I'm not saying you can't do it, but that it takes more mouse or keyboard work to accomplish it. Could be worse, though.
Re:Menus at the top! (Score:3, Interesting)
He didn't say it was closer, he said it was easier. And the two are generally not the same thing.
He's referring to Fitt's Law [wikipedia.org], and one of its interesting corollaries. The relevant bit of the law is that the time it takes to point at a target is related to the size of that target. The interesting corollary is that targets at the edge of a display are infinitely large (given that you can overshoot them endlessly without missing them), and therefore vastly faster and easier to point at than any targets not at the edge of the display.
Moving to a mid-screen menubar requires far more precision, and is therefore much slower, even though it's a shorter distance to move.
You mean just switching easily between the various windows of one application? How is that not covered by expose or command-` ?Re:Mac OSX? (Score:3, Interesting)
If people supported WindowMaker/OpenStep as they really seem to get impressed with OS X Desktop, things could really change in Linux Desktop scene. Especially those guys who spend hard time trying to make OS X work flawless on white box PCs via binary hacks.
Thanks to Fink project I checked WindowMaker again on OS X and I easily recommend it to Mac only people wanting a "real" fullscreen X11 since it is very close to OS X Desktop. In fact I made it my default X11 windowmanager easily. It has some features which lacks from OS X as it would confuse average end user (in Apple eyes) which are there on Next.
If Apple releases Cocoa etc. stuff for open source systems one day, I am sure they will first check WindowMaker and AfterStep.
It is either the submissions choice of words/headline or some Linux distro known for its fanatics but the discussion under this story is completely off topic. I think it is a waste.
Re:Menus at the top! (Score:4, Interesting)
The Mac argument for zoom is that noone wants maximised windows... which is true when you really think about it. Most Windows or indeed Linux converts (that includes me) I see are always struggling to maximise their windows until it hits them - they never really wanted it maximised in the first place. Why would they want to maximise Word on a 36" monitor?
I'm not sure why we maximise windows. I think I had two reasons:
- It was hard to tell which window was what. I have quite a bit of difficulty distinguishing between windows without decent shadows behind them, which neither Windows or Linux at the time provided.
- I always used to use the top of the screen as a sort of mouse reflection point. I knew that if I threw the mouse up there from any point on the screen, it's stop and I could be more precise and lower it carefully to select a menu button... it was easier because the top of the screen was a sort of infinite height target.
The small screen argument has been irrelevant for a few years, I think.
I think the problem you're having is that your mouse settings are crap. Macs are really optimised towards high precision mice optimised so that you can cover the entire screen in a short sweep as well as having good precision when you move slowly. This means quite high acceleration. I can cover over 1000 pixels in about 4cm when I move my mouse sharply, but if I move slowly I can almost move the mouse with 1:1 distance correspondence between mouse distance and screen distance... about 40px/cm.
Plus, try using cmd+tab (and other shortcuts or expose once in a while, though expose is also optimised for decent mouse settings. You do have a point about dual monitor, but I think even mac fanboys tend to accept that it's a PITA for dual monitor. What applications are you using that require menu interaction that frequently? CS3 suite or something? If so, do yourself a favour and learn the shortcuts. It's damn near impossible to use a program with that much menu interaction without learning shortcuts... Windows, Linux or OS X.
Re:Way to confuse NEXT with Mach and BSD (Score:2, Interesting)
So, OPENSTEP/NeXTSTEP/Cocoa/GNUstep are in no way tied to their BSD underpinnings, and have actually been implemented over other OSes.
Re:Menus at the top! (Score:2, Interesting)
Acceleration on OS X is nothing like Windows. It actually works.
As in, I can move the mouse gently within just the range that my fingers reach and only move about a total of an onscreen inch. That's great for precision work.
If I move the mouse the same distance, but quickly, I can reach any side of the screen or corner.
Clearer now?
INCORRECT.