Re: Next GNUstep release?

[Gregory Casamento]

Richard,

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Richard Frith-Macdonald
<address@hidden> wrote:
> I haven't kept up with the state of development/readiness of the windows 
> theme, but I really don't agree with forcibly changing the default theme ... 
> I know it makes me really irate on the odd occasion when Apple change default 
> behaviors on OSX, and I have to look for the  way to revert to previous 
> behaviors.

Most Windows users are not familiar with what NeXT was and many of the
things we use in the GNUstep default theme will be foreign to them.
The reason I'm proposing changing this is so that it blends in by
default without user intervention and things just behave like Windows
so that using GNUstep applications is pleasant for them from the
beginning.

As we all know GNUstep isn't widely used on Windows... aside from
stability (which is getting much better) I believe that the default
theme is on of the reasons why this is so.

> The theme is the user's choice ... so what should happen is that, on 
> installation, the installer should ASK the user which theme they want to use, 
> allowing them to select between available themes, but making the windows one 
> the first selection (assuming here that for most apps it works well ... 
> people can always change theme on a per-app basis anyway).

We would need to write this.  Is there a hook for the installer to
execute something?  I'm not sure how this is different from using
SystemPreferences to switch to the default theme after the
installation is done.  The user still has a choice between the
different themes, I'm just saying that we need to present the most
familiar face to them we can, which, on Windows, would be the Windows
theme. :)

> If the user has already chosen a theme themselves (ie the default is already 
> set in NSGlobalDomain) then the theme that they had previously chosen should 
> be the first/default option when they are asked to choose a default theme  
> ... so they can just hit the return key to continue using the last theme they 
> selected.

I agree with this part...  But I really don't think it should be part
of the installation.

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-- 
Gregory Casamento - GNUstep Lead/Principal Consultant, OLC, Inc.
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell)