[gap-discuss] OpenStep design documents found

[John Howard]

Hi Riccardo,

"The Programming Reference, UI Guidelines, and Specification continue to apply to GNUstep."

1) OpenStep AppKit is practically a subset of GNUstep AppKit.

(Sun multimedia extensions for OpenStep 1996 are not in GNUstep or Apple Cocoa.   Sun defined these in the NX namespace, instead of NS, to prevent confusing the OpenStep Specification.  It would be interesting nowadays to use GStreamer instead.  Currently, GNUstep and Apple Cocoa have differing extensions for multimedia.)

2) GNUstep.org does not provide a Programming Reference or a UI Guidelines document.

A programmer can read the OpenStep Programming Reference to understand the AppKit classes to learn to build an app for GAP.

The OpenStep UI Guidelines advice remains useful to improve the quality and consistency of GAP apps.

3) Porting an app designed for OpenStep to GNUstep is a minor upgrade.

There is not much difference between OpenStep 1994/1996 AppKit and a base version of GNUstep AppKit before the Apple extensions are added.  And GNUstep tools allow versioning the AppKit API according to the extension to be supported by the app.

In conclusion, these high-quality OpenStep design documents are still relevant to GNUstep Application development.  I am grateful they exist to find and to study.

-- John

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 3:24 AM, Riccardo Mottola <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi John,

John Howard wrote:

There are some minor differences between OpenStep 1994 and 1996.  I am interested in the original design reconstructed from these two versions before Apple bought NeXT.  By contrast, GNUstep policy legacy supports Apple extensions for compatibility sake.

all this is historically very interesting, I wonder what relevance it has to GNUstep and specifically to GAP where you are writing this (GNUstep Application Project)

If the documents you find spot something missing or wrong in our AppKit implementaiton, then things are best directed to GNUstep.

If you have OpenStep software you want ported to GNUstep this is the best place!


or well.. just tell us more :)

Riccardo