Re: The future of GNOME.

["Kristoph A. Cichocki-Romanov" <kristoph one-stop-software com>]

Greetings,

>* The PowerPoint clone project
>
>   We do think that we have the tools to write the foundation of a
>usable PowerPoint clone in about 5 days.  We will be dividing the
>tasks for writing such a project and the idea is to finish the program
>in a week.  So far George, Federico, Chris and I have shown interest
>in working in this 5-day project.

I wonder if it is advantageous to work on individual applications in this
fashion. I appreciate the idea that a foundation for a PowerPoint clone
would only take 5 days, but when will it really have the polish required to
present it to its target audience - that is the business types who use this
sort of application.

There is quite allot of independent application development going on,
perhaps we should consolidate these projects to create components which
could be used for a variety of applications. Take the lowly text positioning
engine ( TPE ) - a word processor needs one, a PowerPoint clone needs one, a
page layout application needs one ( heck, the GTK text widget could use
one ) ... plus it would be useful for any number of other projects that
place text on a page. If a TPE was designed and built outside of an
application it could be used, as is, by a number of applications.

One might even go so for as to suggest that a variety of components ( vector
shapes, funky 3D shapes, text ) could be built around a common framework and
assembled as needed to form a specific application. So a word-processor
could use a TPE, which supported containment for other components. The power
point clone could use a TPE, vector shapes, 3D shapes, image frames, etc. If
you had these components you could possibly create a decent vector
illustration application or a page layout application without having to
build a new framework each time.

]{ristoph