Re: The future of GNOME.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>]

> 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.

I think we would have the "guts" written in 5 days.  A bit of our
foundation libraries helps to make consistent applications.

Indeed, polishing the code can take longer, but once we have the
engine in place it is much easier to polish than polishing a
non-existant piece of software :-)

> 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.

Oh, you mean, the GnomeTextItem perhaps?  Raph is going to be
extending this to provide all of the bells and whistles of
professional typesetting in the future.  

If we start with the current API, we could get pretty much what we
need for now.

> 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. 

That would be libEzPaint for us :-)  It is on CVS ;-) 

la la la, happiness.

> 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.

You read our mind.  But we already started implemeting it some time
ago:-).  The idea of EzPaint is to be deployed inside various
applications, like Gnumeric (gnumeric currently has its own drawing
system which is going to be replaced with EzPaint).

Miguel.