FYI: A killer app?

[Dennis Leeuw]

Hi all,

I had an idea some time ago and disgarded it, but the idea keeps popping
up in my head and I would like to share it with you, just to see what
comes up.

The problem with GNUstep is exposure, and people say that it is about
development and killer apps. So one starts looking around what might be
a killer app and what might attracked a lot of people. What is it that
the world is waiting for?
Nothing really! Everything one might want is there. Maybe not the way
you want it but it is there, so what is wrong then? Why invenent
everything over and over again. Something must be wrong then....

Let's start a bit closer to the hardware let's see why one OS works
better or lives longer then the other. Why does Unix keep returning and
why doesn't it die like most OSes ancient OSes did. Because it has one
strong point it has thousands of little tools that do little things, but
they do it so well that you wouldn't want to loose there functionality.
You even want to port them to other OSes just because they work that
well.

Then there was some lunatic that decided that the Xerox invention should
be used in every home and another one that build the biggest bug in
software history just to duplicate the idea. They turned the small is
beautiful principle into large is more features and thus better
principle.

Why not return to the real roots? No killer apps, just tools that work.
But what does that mean for a desktop environment?
That means OO programming. Little cells that function, but what should
it do...

Let's look at the Unix tools and invent graphical equivalents ( <- is
that english?)
Build a graphical awk, groff, less, split, join and more
This would mean no single killer app, but a killer environment. There
are ofcourse some things that need to be solved like:
How to pipe stuff from one to another command ?
How to select all options and how to interface things right ?

That means not creating the next NeXT or MacOS but to create the
environment that is new.

This is not something to do tomorrow just something that has been in my
mind. And since most of you are pretty good, I hoped there might be
coming something useful from it.

Okay this piece is pretty lengthy already.

Greetings,

Dennis

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