Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

There is water on Mars !

Source: NASA.

I have been coding a bit on AbiWord lately.

This include fixing a couple of bugs (first time patch in the Piece Table, and I hope not the last), and the Mac build, as now I have a decent build system. 1GB is not too much for the MacMini

I think my priorities will be:

• fix the Cocoa front end
• finish the dialog framework for HEAD
• implement Unit testing
• fix various stuff on my TODO list
• write documentation

As a tradition, today is April's fool.... Here are the Open Source fools:

• So Planet Gnome and Planet KDE have been inverted. Hehe, two competing project work together for the same joke... Who said that competition was not sane...
• AbiWord spatial

More later.

My latest blog about Gtk MacOS X leveraged some questions. I'll try to answer:

Q: Why don't you help GTK-Cocoa guy ?

A: I never said I wouldn't. I'll just investigate that code and see what is good and what can be done. At first sight, two problems. It is a reimplementation of the widget in Cocoa, and it is Gtk+ 1.2.

Q: Why don't you start with Gtk+ 2.8 that has a Cairo backend which has a Quartz back end ?

A: So what do I do with the event management ? AFAIK Cairo does only provide graphic layer. I'd prefer go Quartz straight, with ATSUI for the text.

Corrections:

I took a shortcut saying that Cocoa use Carbon. Sure it does, for menus and to have the same print and file dialogs. But they are both based on CoreFoundation (in fact Cocoa more like interact transparently with CoreFondation), CoreGraphics and ATSUI.

Now, stop talking, start coding.