Diary of a CrazyFrench

Thursday 31 March 2005

Gimp hack Photoshop look alike

So GimpShop has been released, it is a hack of Gimp to make it look alike Photoshop.

Too bad, it still require X11 on MacOS X.

I wish they spent more time doing really useful things like porting Gtk+ on MacOS X.

Wednesday 30 March 2005

More info on Gtk MacOS X

So I started looking at porting Gtk to MacOS X without requiring X11. Since I don't like reinventing the wheel, I'm looking at what has already been done.

Now a bunch of Q&A:

Q: Why did you start with Gtk 1.2 ?

A: I didn't I just built gtk-osx which is Gtk+ 1.2. My goal is to port Gtk+ 2.6.

Q: Will you use Cocoa ?

A: I don't think. Several reasons:

  • it is too high level
  • I plan to reuse gtk-osx which is Carbon code, as it is a port of the old MacOS 8 mac-gtk

And Carbon is faster and much lower-level. Cocoa itself use Carbon.

Q: Will it run on MacOS 9 ?

A: No plan at all. This will be pure MacOS X.

Q: What about Quartz ?

A: I'll use as much as I can instead of QuickDraw, but Quartz lack lot of functionnalities to be exposed.

Q: When will it done ?

A: Don't know. I haven't started to code. And I have AbiWord to work on.

Q: Why do you do that ?

A: I want people to use Gimp on MacOS X, as well as Gnumeric, Evolution and Dia. In fact any of the fantastic Gtk apps we have.

First step

I pulled a tarball of gtk-osx and did rebuild using Project Builder.

Here is the screenshot:

It is only gtk+ 1.2. It is a long way to the end.

Tuesday 22 March 2005

Migrating Wikis

I want to move away from TWiki to MediaWiki. My problem is migrating the data, as TWiki is RCS files while MediaWiki uses MySQL database. Has anyone an idea beside writing it myself in Perl ?

Sunday 13 March 2005

PDF reading

pcolijn: xpdf had search and select too. That is why I always did use it. But yes, Evince is good stuff, and I'm happy to see a good PDF reader on GNOME. And for once, I'm not afraid to not use xpdf on Linux.

Saturday 12 March 2005

Too much noise about nothing

There have been a lot of noise about nothing, concerning some annoying person (she is well known) that pretend to know everything, to want people to listen to her but to always be deaf when other people talk to her. I don't know why people still listen to her. I myself redirect everything she said to my friend Dave Null. The reason is that someone bitching out developer, but denying to even file the report in the project bug system, but instead spam the comments of a blog is someone we shouldn't even care about. Shall I respect someone that bashes other people work ?

On the other side I mostly agree what concerned people wrote about.

Tuesday 8 March 2005

Banana Republic

No the Banana Republic is not an obscure south-american country as it would be depicted in an Hollywood movie. It is a union of really modern and democratic countries, a big economic power in the world, called Europe. But it is no longer a democracy. Their corruption led to have "laws" passed without democratic vote. But basically they shoot themself a bullet in the head: they allow software patents.

Until now, I was proud of the construction of the EU. Now, I'm just ashamed.

One thing I'm sure: I'll vote NO to the European Constitution, and I'll let my political leader know about that. They want the European Constituion, I want them to know that their inaction will make me vote NO.

I'm not the only one.

Daniel Veillard has a list of companies that did welcome this decision.

Thursday 3 March 2005

Adobe goes Open Source

So Adobe decided to release some open source libraries. Adam & Eve is only a set of libraries, and does not lead immediately to a fully fledged application, but it is really interesting to see what their research labs came up with for building cross-platform applications. I wonder if this is what they use for their major applications.

This is a premiere for them and I hope not the last thing they release. Adobe has often be really publishing file formats specifications: PDF, DNG, PostScript, OpenType, PPD, etc.