Topic 13

Desktop applications

Keywords

• graphical environments (GNOME, KDE)
• office suits
• text editors
• spreadsheeds
• communication protocols (CORBA)

Motivations

In the beginning, GNU/linux was mainly reputated for being an operating system for hackers. Much effort has been made last years for making the operating system easier to install and easier to use. The next step is to develop good, user friendly and free desktop applications, which will satisfy the basic needs of most ordinary users.

There are two main aspects about desktop applications. On the one hand, we have the applications themselves, which may be text editors, spreadsheeds, data base programs, certain graphical applications, and so on. On the other hand, one needs to ensure a good cooperation among these programs. This may require a common look and feel, which can be ensured by developing the applciations using a standard graphical toolkit like Gtk+ or Qt. Secondly, it is important to adopt free, powerful and easy to understand data formats; XML seems to become a common framework here. Finally, it might be nice to let different applications cooperate in a highly integrated way, like running an image editor inside a text editor. Good communication protocols like CORBA are necessary for this.

One of the main strategies for developing desktop applications is to mimick existing proprietary software (think about Star Office). However, we think that it is a great challenge to write more innovative desktop applications, which will be better adapted to the future (think about Gnome or XML compliant applications). One main objective of our theme is to identify the places where such innovation is possible. One example might be the systematic use of extension languages like Guile/Scheme or Python, which enables users to customize their applications.

Subtopics

The following is a non exhaustive list of suggested subthemes:

• Graphical desktop environments.
• Office suits.
• Text editors or word processors.
• Spreadsheads.
• Data base applications.
• Graphical desktop applications.
• Data formats.
• Extensions languages.
• Communication protocols.

Links

Some links to projects that will be covered.

• The Gnome developer platform.
• GNU TeXmacs, a free wysiwyg technical text editor.

Abstract of talk on gnome

Most users know Gnome through its User-interface which is definitely not the biggest part of Gnome. Gnome is also a development platform made up of many distinct libraries which are used by all Gnome applications. Some of those libraries are used to enforce a common look and feel between applications. Others are used to help share as much code as possible between applications:

• GUI libraries: those libraries help you build quickly and easily GUI interfaces for your applications.
• Back-end libraries: those libraries provide a number of useful services to application developers: network-transparent file access, application configuration, components...

My goal is to help new developers to quickly discover the overall features of this platform and learn in more details the architecture of some key technologies.

Abstract of talk on TeXmacs

GNU TeXmacs is a free what-you-see-is-what-you-get scientific text editor, which was both inspired by TeX and GNU Emacs. The program implements high quality typesetting using TeX fonts, but it is also provides a user friendly interface. It will soon be possible to use TeXmacs as a web browser or authoring tool as well.

TeXmacs is one of the first structured wysiwyg editors, which supports user definable extensions through a dynamic macro mechanism. The editor itself can also be extended, since TeXmacs supports the Guile/Scheme extension language.

The high typesetting quality of TeXmacs still goes through for automatically generated formulas. This makes TeXmacs suitable as an interface for computer algebra and scientific computation systems. In our talk we will demonstrate several such systems which have been linked to TeXmacs.

Program