Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Mon May 22, 2006 9:42 pm Post subject:
Neo is built using a custom cross-platform development framework that comes from OOo and does not support native open and save dialogs at this time due to engineering difficulties and a lack of developers. You can go check out some of the native filepicker topics in the development forum for more background.
1. How are they gonna integrate all this into the X11 version? I haven't seen so far no X11 application with features similar to those proposed & my (very limited) knowledge of X11 is that it is a separate world of its own.
2. These projects look like as if the OpenOffice.org Aqua version is already in a state where one could concentrate on rather peripheral aspects like adress book integration and help system. On the other hand, as far as the porting mailinglist suggests, all the current activity seems to be concentrated on various release candidates for X11, fondu/font-problems (X11) or printing problems (X11). Did I miss something?
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue May 30, 2006 7:51 pm Post subject: Re: Will the Summer of Code help?
marcn wrote:
...not sure how many, or if any, of these projects will be picked up, let alone seen to fruition, but one can always hope.
Whoopiti doo.
Some of these have already been up on my OOo spec page for years, some even with more description than just a silly blurb written without research into what code or API requirements may be needed to complete the project. Back in the day I was writing these toy spec docs in the hope someone would get interested in the projects, but nothing ever came to fruition and my time was spent better elsewhere. The Keynote one was the most researched since that was the one that, at the time, some folk were actually interested in. The file filter one merely points out various requirements gleaned in SFO from a browse of the fpicker module and win32 implementations. It misses some things like that the file dialog needs to be able to sport some custom controls as well to fully mirror OOo's functionality (minimally, checkboxes, maximally, preview capabilities).
These were designed to potentially be projects that could be completed in by students in a full college semester. Needless to say nothing ever came out of this solid three weeks of my life spent trying to research or write project proposal specs, not even a peep as to how to improve them (even from the students at EPITA, for whom they were written...in reality it took nearly a semester just to learn the build system at that time). My gut feeling is that if all you have to go on are these short blurbs, it'd be a frustrating experience at best for a professional engineer, much less a student.
Still, I don't think it'd even be feasible to do this for X11 without finding some way to hack into another application's window modalities and the like from another application (an X11 server runs as a separate process from the X11 client). The general structure of OS X prevents this kind of thing from happening which is really good from a security standpoint. Aside from hacking together your own custom X11 server (which really can't be done since users want to use the server they prefer) the only *potential* way may be to hack a separate process observing everything going on in the system to enforce modality across applications. That's really hacking in ways Accessibility wasn't intended to be used and is also not a secure solution (I believe you need admin rights to enable accessibility, but I may be thinking of 10.3).
I also think it's really sleazy to approach SoC or student projects in general with the thought of "oh, we can get someone to implement this feature for us" instead of "what can we do to provide an educational experience for this student". Notice I even tried to outline the code structure of filters (as I understood it) pictorially in the Keynote design doc to try and get across how I start reading a large codebase and trying to make sense of it, something you don't usually encounter in school. IMHO, if you use students as "free labor" instead of trying to proactively educate them, you're doing them a disservice. This is why graduate school can make one want to take an axe to your advisor's head.
I'll stop rambling & ranting on about SoC and grad school. Please direct any future SoC O/T ranbling here. Mods, feel free to move this post there if it's too OT. I'm really exhausted from backpacking right now
2. These projects look like as if the OpenOffice.org Aqua version is already in a state where one could concentrate on rather peripheral aspects like adress book integration and help system. On the other hand, as far as the porting mailinglist suggests, all the current activity seems to be concentrated on various release candidates for X11, fondu/font-problems (X11) or printing problems (X11). Did I miss something?
Martin
Martin,
I have the same feeling as you on #2. Dreaming of future enhancements is ... nice, but wouldn't it be better to make sure there is a good foundation?!? It has been ... very confusing reading?
I had looked at some of Ed's note in the past and was very ... impressed with the supplied details and information. I even understood some of the concepts and what was being proposed and discussed. (sigh - I was reduced to offering help analysing the Web log files. Something I could do/understand )
We have had student interns work on projects before and the details have always needed to very detailed. Anything else lead to a lot of frustration and confusion.
The more detailed the project, the more pre-planing required. A well designed project and strong mentor can lead to a good experience for all. Just the few details I've seen about the core of OOo makes my eyes water and brain ... hurt!
It's hard enough explaining to new users why Neo Developers can't just change/update/"correct" the OOo code, "simply" use the mac File picker!, or Why the Suite looks like MS Office, OR why X11 looks so bad on the Mac.... BAM! (brain explodes! )
Philip (I'm going to place more Ice on my ... brain )
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