GNUstep Weekly Update

Week ending 8 April 2001

The big news for this week is the announcement of the 
LaunchPad 1.0 release. LaunchPad is a
collection of libraries for creating non-graphical tools and
applications using an API based on OpenStep and the MacOS X API. See
http://www.gnustep.org/information/lp_release.html for more
information.

gnustep-make 

Version 1.0.0 released.

gnustep-base (Foundation)

Version 1.0.0 released.

gnustep-guile (Scripting Library)

Version 1.0.0 released.

Also the GNU 3DKit project has moved to
a new location at http://www.3dkit.org

ANNOUNCE: GNUstep LaunchPad Version 1.0.0 Released

ANNOUNCE: GNUstep LaunchPad Version 1.0.0 Released

GNUstep Developers are happy to announce the first user release of
GNUstep LaunchPad. GNUstep LaunchPad is a collection of libraries for
creating non-graphical tools and applications using an API based on
OpenStep and the MacOS X API.  As with its godfather, the OpenStep
system developed by NeXT, developers have noted that GNUstep allows
faster development time and more flexibility than with other common
application development libraries.

GNUstep Launchpad consists of the following packages:

GNUstep Make - A collection of make scripts that make configuration,
building and packaging of projects almost trivial.

GNUstep Base - A collection of Objective-C classes that provide all
the fundamental objects required in most applications, such as
dictionaries, unicode strings, distributed objects, timers, and more.

GNUstep Guile - A package that allows one to use the Guile scripting
language within GNUstep projects

JIGS - An interface to Java, that allows one to use GNUstep objects in
Java code and Java objects in GNUstep code.

This entire suite of tools and libraries, collectively called GNUstep
LaunchPad should allow developers to rapidly develop cross-platform
applications using a set of object-oriented tools and a well developed
API. Developers should be able to port applications from the
well-known MacOS X development system to GNUstep with almost no

GNUstep Weekly Update

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Week ending 15 April 2001

I just commited some changes to the libraries. Frederic De Jaeger
submitted a wonderful patch to allow the GUI backends to be compiled as
a bundle, so you can switch between backends with a simple default.
Because of this there really is no need for the backend component of
LIBRARY_COMBO, so I removed it. Now LIBRARY_COMBO by default is just:

gnu-gnu-gnu

You can switch between backends using a user default 'GSBackend'. By
default it uses libgnustep-xgps, but to swtich to the dps backend do:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain GSBackend libgnustep-xdps

Try it out. It's really cool (perhaps it will be easier for people to
improve the DPS backend now?...). 

gnustep-make 

Default library-combo changed to gnu-gnu-gnu. Also fixes to get FreeBSD
working again.

gnustep-base (Foundation)

A few changes to make it easier to compile on Darwin. Still not there yet
though. Added some important DO and NSString bug fixes (memory leaks, etc).

GNUstep weekly update

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Week ending 22 April 2001

gnustep-base (Foundation)

Code optimisations have been made to dramatically speed up
handling of the contents of directories.
Various minor bugs have been fixed - including a couple of memory 
leaks.
New memory management debugging functions have been added (and 
documented).
The NSTask class has been fully documented.

gnustep-gui (GUI frontend library)

Some bugs have been fixed in color handling - it's now quite easy to 
change
the colors in which the GUI is drawn.  For instance, using the command
defaults write NSGlobalDomain controlBackgroundColor '0 0 1' causes
controls to have their normal background drawn in blue (the color is 
specified as
red, green, and blue components, each from 0.0 to 1.0).NB. While the 
NSColor
documentation is skeletal, it does list the names of the system colors 
you can
set.
A problem was fixed in services - an application can now provide 
services
to itsself.  For those who don't know, the 'Services' menu in a GNUstep 

GNUstep Weekly Update

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Week ending 29 April 2001

gnustep-base (Foundation)

Several bugs have been fixed (making the current CVS code rather more
robust than the 1.0 release) and more work has been done towards
making the code portable to Apple systems.  Minor optimisation has
also been done, New variable have been added to the make system so
that any software being built by the make package can tell exactly
what version of GNUstep-base it will be working with.  The XML parser
API has been modified to avoid exposing any of the internals of the
underlying Gnome-libxml code.  This should protect GNUstep users from
changes to the libxml API.  It also made it possible to wrap the XML
parser classes for use bu Java.  The documentation has been updated.

gnustep-gui (GUI frontend library)

There have been bugfixes made in the NSMatrix and NSTableView 
classes.

gnustep-make (Makefiles package)

Support for building Java tools added and installation and building 
of javadoc documentation improved.
Added a configuration option to let you specify an alternative 
thread library.

JIGS (Java language interface)