Working together

["Julian Regel" <julian white-tower demon co uk>]

Hi.

 Although this list seems pretty quiet, and a C/C++ religious war 
probably won't improve things, the idea of having the two projects 
working together is excellent! Kudos to the GNOME team for initiating 
such an effort.

 I am a user. I don't really care about languages, toolkits or 
licensing issues. I'm looking to get a standard GUI for my Linux 
desktop. If we want Linux to become a mainstream OS you need to 
target people like me :-)  At the moment I'm running with KDE which I 
like very much. It's really impressed my "Windows-based" collegues at 
work! I haven't tried any GNOME programs yet as it seems to be still 
early in development (that's not a criticism, just an observation), 
but probably will in the future.

 This seems to be the perfect place to ask some questions on what the 
different groups are working on... :-) Hope no-one minds.

1) Will KDE and GNOME apps be indistiguishable? Will cut and paste 
work between K apps and G apps (for text, graphics, audio, [files?], 
how about drag and drop, object linking and embedding?

2) Is anyone working on an OpenDoc style format? Both projects seem 
to be looking into using CORBA but has it got further than that? I 
seem to remember some comments about a document format, but it's been 
pretty quiet recently.

3) GNOME use GUILE as a flexible scripting language. Does KDE have an 
equivilent or will they also support GUILE?

4) What about application features such as help file formats, menu 
layout, draggable toolbars, themes, dialog box messages and errors 
etc etc? Will these work the same way under KDE and GNOME?


Personally I would hope that I will never have to say to a new user:
"Ah yes, although that application looks pretty similar, it does work 
in a slightly different way...".
Netscape (Motif) and KDE (in Motif look-and-feel) *look* pretty 
similar, but work differently (even down to pointer graphics, and 
file dialogue boxes).

 Please feel free to discuss these issues, and add your own points, 
but religious wars aren't going to get us far.

 Julian
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| Julian Regel: julian@white-tower.demon.co.uk |
|     http://www.white-tower.demon.co.uk/      |
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