Do we need a unified desktop?
It would be great if a new "grand unified api project" would emerge?
I don’t see Apple and Microsoft settling on open API standard anytime soon. What the open source community really need, is a stable platform for software to target.
Here are what I think would help make every system great:
- Something that can run atop many operating systems
- A standard framework for settings which make them exportable/importable
- Make the programs aware of the technical level of your user so they can offer a proper interface
In brief, a framework so great that software vendors will have no other logical choices of target in the long term tan the open standard.
It is indeed a huge task to tackle, the key to realisation is getting everybody to adopt it and eventually move their software to it. That does not mean KDE and Gnome have to come to war or merge their project. It means the programmin interface should be harmonized and portable. KDE seems to have a good lead on that front. I would like software vendos jump the bandwagon of open source.
Bottom line is, the less I pay to get my system running, the more I can pay for specialized software.
With the tightening of the economy is another factor we need to look at. The sooner we invest in standardised open software, the sooner the it will be simple to manage and more economical, enabling small business to be more competitive. Instead of buying software, we hire engineers to setup and adapt existing code.
OpenSTEP died about 20 years ago, the yellow box seems to be abandoned by Apple. Will GnuSTEP really shines or do we need something new?
Posted from the near future (just enought apocalyptic) with the help of Windows 7 Beta.
Uncategorized, computers, it, open source, operating systems, software
I was excited about the Next products, I guess someone’s ego trumped all over it. How do you get vendors such as Adobe to target something like OpenStep ?
Anyway, good luck with your project.
What is Next I never heard of ‘em.
When Steve Jobs “left” Apple (it was a couple of months after getting John Scully to be the new CEO at Aple) he founded Next Computers and developed the platform called NextStep. It’s a blend of Unix system with PostScript Display system. Basically, the diplay was like a live printer using the same language to display to the screen, as the one used to print documents. Then OpenStep API was elaborated mainly by SUN Microsystems and Next. It was supposed to be a new universal API. Next Computers was not a success, being waayy too ahead of it’s time. Today, MacS X inherited OPENSTEP and pushed it further, but it<s vocation as one target development environment has iminished greatly, to about none, what you can do is target GnuSTEP and you will be MacOS X compatible. Check out theuir website for more details.
In fact, the grand father of all graphical computers was invented by Xerox’s Palo-Alto Research Center.