Just look in the usual place. Very few updates this time, but at least is a sign of life, and it should improve in the next release.
AS
AS
The collected works of o2ric
My opinion: it's going to be a pretty hard task.
I know marginally GTK 1.x, I don't even consider GTK 2.x as it crawls on my R5K 200M O2, and when a GUI crawls on a 200 MHz processor just to pop up a menu, it means that is just a piece of stinking crap code.
Now, I have already seen this same movie in the Amiga camp, many many years ago. The lacking of a consistent, expandable toolkit led to the proliferation of 4 or 5 toolkits, each one of them of course claiming that they were the best. The net result, which is also something we are seeing today (partially alleviated by the usage of themes), is that you have a moltitude of applications, each one with its GUI and quirks, eventually mocked up to feel as much as possible as the original GUI.
The stupidity and blindness of OSF, with their nonsense licensing scheme for Motif, has forced the people to pursue a different path. I can understand their initial motivation: I would never stick with the poor Athena widgets. I understand much less what followed, i.e. the creation of a toolkit based on top of Xlib instead of Xt (GTK), with a complete different and incompatible API and programming model, plus the idea that the L&F of Windows was something to be pursued to make the applications more attractive to the Gates' users. It would have been much better if all the efforts were addressed to the finalization and enhancement of lesstif, creating a true competition (and with a better implementation) to the original OSF Motif.
Today, we have GTK 1, GTK 2, Qt, wxWindow, FLTK and Motif, plus eventually some more toolkits I'm not aware of. With the exception of FLTK, which is the lighter of them (but also not as complete as the remaining), the only snappy toolkit is Motif, which is native. Unfortunately, the real big problem here is that Motif is missing a lot of common widgets that you can find in almost every other GUI toolkit for any platform (unless, like some software house did, you develop your own private Motif widgets). And creating new widgets for Motif, if someone has had the time to skim over the Xt and Motif books, is not a trivial task, let alone the fact that Motif GUI builders tend to be commercial and expensive.
But even in the case of having an estabilished set of enhanced/added widgets for Motif, you are facing with the dilemma of who is going to use that enhanced toolkit. It's not that the mere existence of such a beast will make it automatically accepted in place of GTK/Qt/putyourfavoritenamehere. Which, in turn, means that the applications will still be developed with the "alien" toolkits, and you are forced to reapply a gigantic set of patches for every new version which will pop up. A nightmare...
There is one last thing to be considered: SGI specific stuff it's not something that all the Motif developers are aware of. When I made xmcd completely integrated with the SGI desktop, it tooks me more than a week of patches, and a lot of mail exchanges with the past SGI freeware coordinator, to achieve the result you have since a year. And xmcd is a Motif application, which in the past emulated the SGI L&F, but that in fact was not following the SGI reccomendations at all.
In conclusion, I think that a better way to spend your efforts would be to add the missing pieces to Motif (there are many, for example list trees), integrate them with the SGI L&F, dump all your enhancements on lesstif, and create of set of blazing fast applications that demonstrate how without using <yourmostdislikedtoolkithere> is much better. Of course, you will have to fight against the GNU/GPL talibans, against the "there is no life without a theme" fans, but so it's life...
Have fun,
AS
I know marginally GTK 1.x, I don't even consider GTK 2.x as it crawls on my R5K 200M O2, and when a GUI crawls on a 200 MHz processor just to pop up a menu, it means that is just a piece of stinking crap code.
Now, I have already seen this same movie in the Amiga camp, many many years ago. The lacking of a consistent, expandable toolkit led to the proliferation of 4 or 5 toolkits, each one of them of course claiming that they were the best. The net result, which is also something we are seeing today (partially alleviated by the usage of themes), is that you have a moltitude of applications, each one with its GUI and quirks, eventually mocked up to feel as much as possible as the original GUI.
The stupidity and blindness of OSF, with their nonsense licensing scheme for Motif, has forced the people to pursue a different path. I can understand their initial motivation: I would never stick with the poor Athena widgets. I understand much less what followed, i.e. the creation of a toolkit based on top of Xlib instead of Xt (GTK), with a complete different and incompatible API and programming model, plus the idea that the L&F of Windows was something to be pursued to make the applications more attractive to the Gates' users. It would have been much better if all the efforts were addressed to the finalization and enhancement of lesstif, creating a true competition (and with a better implementation) to the original OSF Motif.
Today, we have GTK 1, GTK 2, Qt, wxWindow, FLTK and Motif, plus eventually some more toolkits I'm not aware of. With the exception of FLTK, which is the lighter of them (but also not as complete as the remaining), the only snappy toolkit is Motif, which is native. Unfortunately, the real big problem here is that Motif is missing a lot of common widgets that you can find in almost every other GUI toolkit for any platform (unless, like some software house did, you develop your own private Motif widgets). And creating new widgets for Motif, if someone has had the time to skim over the Xt and Motif books, is not a trivial task, let alone the fact that Motif GUI builders tend to be commercial and expensive.
But even in the case of having an estabilished set of enhanced/added widgets for Motif, you are facing with the dilemma of who is going to use that enhanced toolkit. It's not that the mere existence of such a beast will make it automatically accepted in place of GTK/Qt/putyourfavoritenamehere. Which, in turn, means that the applications will still be developed with the "alien" toolkits, and you are forced to reapply a gigantic set of patches for every new version which will pop up. A nightmare...
There is one last thing to be considered: SGI specific stuff it's not something that all the Motif developers are aware of. When I made xmcd completely integrated with the SGI desktop, it tooks me more than a week of patches, and a lot of mail exchanges with the past SGI freeware coordinator, to achieve the result you have since a year. And xmcd is a Motif application, which in the past emulated the SGI L&F, but that in fact was not following the SGI reccomendations at all.
In conclusion, I think that a better way to spend your efforts would be to add the missing pieces to Motif (there are many, for example list trees), integrate them with the SGI L&F, dump all your enhancements on lesstif, and create of set of blazing fast applications that demonstrate how without using <yourmostdislikedtoolkithere> is much better. Of course, you will have to fight against the GNU/GPL talibans, against the "there is no life without a theme" fans, but so it's life...
Have fun,
AS
squeen wrote: I wouldn't might a little printer AND email notififaction icon tucked in somewhere, I'll put it on the TODO list. Although I have no idea how to check the printer status. Something I'll have to dig around for...if you have a clue---lend it to me.
For the printer, it's not difficult, but you will have to study impressario and the printing stuff machinery that surrounds it. You can peek in the CUPS source code and see the support for the SGI desktop I added two years ago. Just consider that this stuff is an H*A*C*K , as it relies on undocumented behaviours and flags of IRIX standard lpstat (which the CUPS lpstat of course emulates, at least in part).
AS