Application wish list

What applications do you want for GNUstep? Please check the list of applications before adding.

Database

DatabaseModeller.app

See DBModeler, currently a work in progress.

Database management

A desktop software (like PgAccess for example) to manage database. This program could use the GDL2 (Gnustep Database Library). It could be a good exercice and demonstration of this very good library.

Development

Project Management app

Something like MrProject. It has to be simple, not overbloated as MS Project.

nib2gmodel/nib2gorm without OPENSTEP/MacOSX

I want;but I heard it is so hard to implementation. :-(

CVS app

Port CVL.

Graphics

Blender

Blender has recently (since October 2002) gone GPL. Consisting of porting the Blender GUI/WM abstract library GHOST, using NSOpenGLContext, or a CoreGraphics implementation one day. Objective-C++ might be needed for implementing GHOST, but probably can be worked around easily enough. There is an OSX port, probably using CoreGraphics.

Blender Foundation Homepage

Most of Blender is written in C++ doesn't seem to use CoreGraphics but Apple's GL.

OmniGraffle clone

(I don't really know what this is, but people have said they want one. Someone please add a description! :)

This is for diagram, UML .... I 'm thinking to write it. But not *right now*. It will have probably a Gorm-feel

OmniGraffle was a clone of Lighthouse Design's Diagram.app, which was a re-working of the NeXT Developer Example Sketch.app, adding rubber-banding / angular connection lines.

OmniOutliner clone

This is a really cool app which can be used for anything. Mostly i think it is used to organise your minds while being creative (some kind of knowledge manager).

The inspiration for this was Jayson Adams' Millennium Software's NoteBook.app, which lives again as the (commercial) program NoteTaker.

Painting app (photoshop)

Bitmap drawing app.

Think Photoshop, not The Gimp.

In fact, forget that. Something new.

Something usable - can do Photoshop, but easy to learn. The Gimp can nearly do photoshop, but who can use it?

It would be great if it consisted of two parts - a very small very useful image viewer/manager (eg gqview) and the actual editor plugin (the big part). So installing image-core would give a very small useful app, then adding image-edit would make it into photoshop.

When opening an image file eg by clicking on it or running image-core thefile.jpg then only the core apps should start, so it starts real quick. If i right-click and choose edit or something .. THEN the other stuff is pulled in.

Or whatever. Just an idea. But makes development path cool. Could also have a vector plugin, or whatever.

Maybe we should wait, when (if?) Gimp gets 'gegl'ed. then having a decent photoshop like app would be as simple as writing a gui for the gegl foundation. + gives us a nice featureset + plugins!

Maliwan project is aiming to achieve the same goal of GEGL. Right now GEGL isn't even half complete but we can still reimplement it base on GEGL's design. lastlife is waiting for you in irc if you want to discuss the idea. Maliwan is planned to be the heart of the BluTulip which is the actual application.

• porting http://seashore.sourceforge.net/ from their website: Seashore is an open source image editor for Cocoa. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP's technology and uses the same native file format.

a screenshot is here: [1] which looks very clean and easy to use.

Pixen (Pixel Art Tool)

Pixen is a decent, open source pixel art tool and there aren't alot of free or professional programs like it. There is also a compliment tool by the same guys for mapping called Reptile.

A port can be found here.

MultiMedia

iTunes/Rhythmbox clone

It would be nice to see a music or video player with real music/media management like Rhythmbox or iTunes. iTunes has started to support management of movies and videoclips, so maybe media management is the way to go?

DivX/XViD/DVD/VCD Player

I see that there was at least an attempt to port mplayer at one point but it seems to be dead. Maybe VLC which does have an OSX version, could be ported.

Looks cool, but requires CoreFoundation -- cbv

Networking

ICQ

And other instant messengers.

• Check http://freshmeat.net/projects/fireapp/
• See Grouch.

Web browser

Seems to be a popular request :).

• Most of the best ideas (Camino and Apple's Safari) rely on Objective-C++ support that wasn't available with the stock GCC until the 4.1 snapshots.

• Stefan began porting Webcore to GNUstep by splitting the Objective-C++ code into C++ and Objective-C modules. Unfortunately, while it can render pages using an (old) version of WebCore, it still lacks a significant amount of implementation before it could actually be the GNUstep WebKit.

• User:Geocar worked on Stefan's code for a bit to get something that looked like this:

File:Webkit-on-gnustep.png before deciding to try using the new Objective-C++ compiler in GCC. Will note how this all turns out :)

• I could port OrchidWeb to GNUStep. I'd just need enough examples on developing the views from code to do it.

• Apparently, Camino is written in Objective-C++, which GCC can't compile (although Apple is supposed to have contibuted the patch). Until gcc can compile mixed obj-c and c++, it can't be ported. There is a thread about this at [2] (it's in french).

Video conferencing software

There's Gnomemeeting (excellent piece of software), but I don't like Gnome too much (all those dependencies).

Update: Gnomemeeting 0.9.6 is supposed to work without Gnome libs (limited functionality).

PIM

Calendar

check SKYRIX libs (Opengroupware).

http://www.opengroupware.org/cvsweb/cvsweb.cgi/OpenGroupware.org/SOPE/skyrix-core/NGiCal/

Task management app

Chronographer (lobbying by ludovic) + libical or ~TaskManager (lobbying by Fabien) + libical

Check SKYRIX libs (Opengroupware)

Text Processing / Office

Abiword (Word Processor)

A port of the Cocoa version of AbiWord would be great, considering a word processor is a pretty vital application, and that Abiword is a pretty good one.

Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet application would be great for GNUstep. A clone of Lotus Improv or Lighthouse Design's Parasheet would be a nice thing for GNUstep to have.

CSS/html editor

A cool html/css editor - emphasis on the css structural side.

Object oriented properties application to CSS element definitions, and insert those properties into HTML in web pages. Don't worry about WYSIWIG - that's what web browsers are for, displaying web pages. Just make a object-oriented CSS/HTML editor.

Maybe port Nexus for that?

This might actually be feasible, however, Nexus is based on libwww and its source is, well, very NeXTSTEP'ish... -- cbv

A text editor

A simple text editor that can read and write plain or rich text, including both simple word processing functionality (nothing too splashy, like frames) and optional programming features (like syntax highlighting -- not just coloring; controllable tabs; tab v. space indentation, multiple language support). Programming features could be provided by a bundle, but it would be good to for the app to be designed with that bundle in mind.

This editor which is to guarantee me world domination includes a split view where the other pane locates and displays the corresponding end-tag/start-tag when programming.

Ink is not that editor. :)

Softpanorama seems to give a good overview of editors

We have to distinguish between a text editor as programming tool (CodeEditor.app) and a text editor as a word processor (WordProcessor.app?). They are two different approaches to text editing and text processing.

Source code editing view and associated inspector panels and preferences should be provided as a framework, so the SourceView should be reused in other apps. CodeEditor should be only some default wrapper for that framework.

WordProcessor.app sould be an application that extends NSText system. (With easy-to-use paragraph style editing)

How about interfacing with Scintilla? -- Hasan --

A simple DTP application

A simple frame-based application for desktop publishing. Something like Calamus (here is the documentation of tools and modules). Nothing fancy, just application that can lay out frames, control text flow, use paragraph styles and master pages.

I'd rather see TeXView.app come back myself.... I think it's far more feasible (doing a decent page layout app is _hard_ just as Donald E. Knuth). Perhaps better still would be to take advantage of LyX's ``GUI-independence and provide a GNUstep front-end for it, http://www.lyx.org .

No, nothing like LyX or TeX. I have in mind a visual page layout editing tool with features as described above (similar to PageMaker). LyX and TeX are a bit different approaches and should be alternatives to Frame based DTP application.

- Stefan

I think a heavy-weight drawing package w/ page layout features would be a better solution here (this is the workflow I'm using on my NeXT Cube now), then it could be tied into an XML-based workflow in a fashion like to Apple's new Keynote, perhaps in a fashion like to Pages-by-Pages. To describe my workflow a bit---I now use Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube w/ Omega (Unicode-aware TeX variant) for most of my page layout. IME, if a document gets too large to manage w/ Altsys Virtuoso, it might as well go into TeX... Not that I'd mind seeing a replacement for PasteUp.app, I just think that a drawing program is more immediately important / useful.

For simple DTP utility, I'd dearly love to see a re-creation of TouchType.app

- William

Maybe you should take a look at TeXmacs. Looks promising and is in great need of a GNUstep frontend.

- david.

Interesting. I'd seen TeXMacs mentioned on comp.text.tex quite often, but hadn't realized it had gotten as far as it had. Interesting counterpoint to LyX.

- William

One really interesting thing would be to have a fame class which would useful enough so it could be used to put together a simple DTP Application but which would be flexible enough that it could be available to any application - the text control is a standard control for windows managers like MS Windows or Gnome. If there were an equivalent "flowing graphic control", you'd have a powerful building block indeed (note that in MS windows, the text control is actually poor enough that no credible application can built around besides notepad). Also, for a programming text editor, scintilla is great. One thing to consider is that for DTP/HTML editor, what you would want would be a *superset* of the scintilla interface. It would be great to add all the different features in such a way that you didn't have interfaces duplicating each other's functionalities.

-- JosephSolbrig

Digital Librarian-like

I would really, really like a Digital Librarian for GNUstep. Basically, imagine an application that manage your documents the same way iTunes manage your music or iPhoto your photos... (to take well-known OSX apps as example ;-)

It would provide 1) automatic management of the documents by projects/ideas/whatever metadata 2) index your documents to let you search quickly in it 3) handles bibliography As a postgrad student I have a LOT of articles in PDF/PS/DVI/html on my hard drive, and such an application would be really nice to help managing that.

A Digital Librarian screenshot: http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/Librarian.jpg A screenshot of Vertex Librarian, a similar program for NeXTSTEP: http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/VertexLibrarian.jpg

http://unix.freshmeat.net/projects/mylibrary/? Madleser 17:19, 2 October 2006 (CEST)

Misc

Old NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP apps

See this side (in French) for a list.

Google.app

• Complete with ApplicationServices
• WebBrowser integration
• Using proper NS* classes for HTML retrieval
• Ability to select which Google server (www.google.ca, www.google.co.jp)
• Google News, Google Groups, Google Images too.

DMG.app?

• Installer/extractor/viewer for DMG images.
• Create DMG packages
• Useful for OSX source packages

Note: The DMG format is Apple proprietary and undocumented. Basically, DMG support is only available under OSX and its unlikely to change.

CronniX - A cron front end

http://www.koch-schmidt.de/cronnix/

That won't be easily portable, as different OSs use a different cron setup. Eg. BSD has (and uses) both, /etc/crontab __and__ /var/cron/tabs/<username> ...

PfaEdit - A font editor

(This is now called FontForge)

http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net

Actually, Cenon (see above) is able to do some limited font editing. Not to knock pfaedit, I use it a lot and think it's a way cool program. Wonder if the two could be merged somehow.

GuileServices / StepTalk Services

On NeXTSTEP there was an application (service?) called TickleServices that allowed you to write your own services in the Tcl language. Something along these lines, but using guile/steptalk would be a nice addition to gnustep.

Printer.app

An application/framework for managing printers, printer properties and print queues. (CUPS frontend?) (NOTE: To an extent, GNUstep already has CUPS support, and has number of builtin classes and panels for managing printers and printer settings. They may just need to be extended a little for different uses and environments.)

Growl! (Global notification system)

Growl! uses distributed notification center to display a graphic message on screen. Every application can send messages to it, for example, when new emails arrive, buddies sign in the instant messager, a task end, etc. It is very easy to implement.

Parts require CoreFoundation and/or WebKit -- cbv