Sunday, Monday
Spent some awkward time with my ex-girlfriend who paid me a surprise visit. Learnt about James Joyce and saw Spider-man 2 again.
Tuesday
Gone Me. I was very skeptical of this at first, I still am skeptical but in theory it would be great to have web browser so well engineered that different backends could easily be swapped in.
There is always a trade off though. Best case scenario the trade off is just developer time and energy but in the worst case the backend could not be cleanly seperated out and there would performance penalties and massive maintainance overheads.
It took some getting used to but I like the button order in Gnome 2 and it makes a lot of sense to me. Again I'd like if we could have it both ways, but quickly patching the source is a long way from have a clean maintainable solution.
Sometimes it helps to state the obvious.
The Gnome desktop is not GTK.
GTK is at the core of Gnome and is written in C.
Gnome is not and should not be written only in C.
Gnome is not a toolkit, it is a desktop platform and should be making it easier to develop applications.
I am surprised that Python has not been made a part of Gnome already.
If anything Gnome should be using more languages and tools that allow Rapid Application Developement (RAD) because high level languages mean more developers. Developers! Developers! Developers!.
The underlying purpose of the recent discussions about Java and Mono was the need for Gnome to make use of higher level langauges and how best to go about it. New technologies and better standardisation will make the choice of tools increasingly irrelevant and Gnome and KDE will be able to concentrate on serving differernt user bases instead of different developers and toolkits.
Opinion
Gnome is not an acronym. Some say it stands for GNU Network Object Model Enviroment which is terribly contrived and was cleary retrofitted to fit the word gnome. If it ever even made sense to begin with, it does not anymore.
How GNU is Gnome really? I'm sure sure Richard Stallman (another creator of abhorrant acronyms) has some interesting opinions on that one. Bonobo was to fulfill the promise of the Network Object Model but that has not happened.
When source code is freely available and developers are willing to cooperate it is more practical and effective to share functionality at the library level (some KDE developers cleverly reuse these same libraries and make higher level KPart Object from them). For most cases Bobono is overkill, embedding an application inside another application does not often produce a particularly friendly user interface. In most cases what is needed is a preview and a some sort of a callback so that the embedded object can still be edited and the preview be updated automatically. (A good example of this is the all that is abigimp plugin).
Words like scuba and radar have long since dropped
the convoluted explanations for their acronyms and it is time for Gnome to drop its contrived acronym too.
Acronyms are not clever, they are not cute, it does nothing but add another complication so lets keep it simple, please call it Gnome, okay?