Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Friday 15 April 2005

GNOME Office vs OpenOffice

Uraeus: I'd really love to see GNOME Office to take over, because I find that OOo is just too much bloat, and it orientation towards Java doesn't make feel more confident. For the presentation tool, I don't know what is going on, but there have been various projects to attempt to write one, and they all failed.... I don't know why, perhaps it is only a curse. Gnumeric is so nice (let alone AbiWord, I'm biased)

The other question I'm asking is about the component APIs. There are lot of rumors going about Bonobo and the fact that it does not evolve, this is not meant to help. If anybody has an answer, I'd love to hear it.

As for UNO, if someone can provide a version that does work independently of OpenOffice, then we might have a candidate. But Gnumeric use Bonobo currently as it is the logical choice.

Bounty hunting

So Ubuntu Linux has set up some bounties for implementing features. The interesting thing is that they offer a bounty to provide Python scripting in several applications, including in AbiWord.

GdkDisplay

I have implemented GdkDisplay on MacOS X. It is basically a wrapper around NSScreen class and NSApplication for a couple of things. It is probably not complete, like handling the clipboard.

Next will be GdkScreen, a wrapper the NSScren instances.

I also started to write some unit tests, so that with make check I can verify I'm not crashing, and that it works...

Art Urbain - Picture of the day, April 14th, 2005

In my test shots of the EF 100mm Macro f/2.8 lens, I ended up taking pictures inside the metro in Montreal.

At the McGill metro station, is there is this ad on the wall, which one may consider as some sort of Art Urbain. I wanted to take a picture of that, when I finally go the framing correct, I had someone in the picture. I waited a few minutes that he goes away to take it again.

Finally, selecting the pictures, I thought that somebody within the frame, like this, made the picture much better. I got lucky.