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Submission + - GNUstep Kickstarter Campaign Launched (kickstarter.com)

borgheron writes: The maintainer of GNUstep has launched a kickstarter campaign to get the time to make GNUstep more complete and get it's APIs up to at least a Mac OS 10.6 level of compatibility. This will allow applications for Mac OS X to run on Linux with a simple recompile using new tools developed by the GNUstep team to directly build from xcodeproj project files. If the kickstarter project is funded beyond it's $50,000 goal, it's possible that WebKit and Darling might also be completed allowing applications built on Mac OS X to run without the need for a recompile... think WINE-like functionality for Mac OS X applications on other platforms... including Windows, Linux, BSD, etc.

Comment Re:Anti-Apple week (Score 3, Insightful) 406

er... the iPhone is possibly not the miracle that some hailed, but it's difficult to be sure until they actual sell it :-) In particular, most of your "problems" are misleading:
  • No 3G. A killer in Europe for something at that level. I'm assuming this won't be a problem by the time of launch though, because I simply cannot imagine anyone trying to launch a 2.5G smart phone here these days.
    Well, THIS model does not have 3G, only 2.5G. But Steve Jobs specifically said they were working on a 3G model. Considering it's only supposed to come in europe around september (so, likely introduced at the paris expo) I frankly expect that it will be a 3G model.
  • No video calling. Minor league problem for me and directly related to no 3G.
    As you said, without 3G, video calling is useless anyway. Beside, video calling is more a gadget than something useful, really... did you ever try videoconf with your webcam ? do you use it regularly ? most people in then do not use it apart from an initial "wow it's cool". And with a webcam there's still a few occasions where it is useful (showing kids to grandparents, business conf..) but these uses are anyway quite impractical for a frickin mobile PHONE. Now tell me that Apple would let you plug an iSight on their new AppleTV, and do videoconf in your living room, and here it would be interesting.
  • "First proper browser on a phone" says Jobs in the keynote. Err...no, no at all. My phone is happily running Opera, as are plenty of others. Er, I have opera on my 3G mobile. You can't seriously compare it to what was shown on the iPhone. The only vaguely comparable browser on a mobile device I know of is opera, but running on the nokia 770, eg with a high res screen. Certainly not the mobile browsers you have on mobile phones.
  • No user-replaceable battery. No spare batteries? Are they serious? Not a problem with an iPod, you just lose your music for a while. Annoying but liveable. For a phone however, that's a much bigger hassle.
    Yes, that sucks. The autonomy seems fairly good though, and there was this talk about using two batteries, but still, it would be better to have a user-replaceable battery. At first I even thought that this black part on the back was here for just that...
  • No third-party software. Err...no. Won't fly for me.
    There WILL be 3rd party software -- jobs said it, and if you think about it, why mention Cocoa and Core Animation if not ! The question is not that. The question is that apparently Apple wants to "control" the software that will run on the iPhone; how THAT will work is unknown yet (eg, could be a compliance test your app will need to pass, or could be more closed -- we just do not know. Wait for the developer conference this summer...). I admit, as a cocoa developer I'm quite pissed about it, I would have prefererred an open access. Though if it's just a compliance test it will be ok for me (depends of course if it wil be costly or not, or if the compliance test will apply to all apps or only the ones using the GSM chip, etc.). As you see, there's a lot of possible combinations on how that will work, and we can only make conjectures for the moment. But there will be 3rd party software, they said it, and it would be moronic to not have them.
  • Can't use your "iTunes music" as a ring tone. Now admittedly the source I read for this didn't make it clear if they really meant iTMS-purchased music or just any old MP3 but either way that's pretty poor.
    First time I hear that rumor. I frankly doubt you'll have a problem to set your ring tone... anyway, it's only a rumor. Wait for the real device.
  • No GPS (that I'm aware of). I'm spending that amount of money, I'd like a GPS-enabled phone please.
    Far from a deal-breaker. Sure that would be a nice addition.
  • No radio. For the love of god, what is it that Apple have against radios? Even the built-in Radio function of iTunes is utterly useless. I don't want to carry around an add-on for that, it should be built into the phone like damned near every other phone.
    The whole point of the iPod is to NOT be a radio... nothing changed with the iPhone.
  • Fixed capacity - I can't move my own flash cards in and out of the phone.
    Extensibility would be nice, though capacity of memory cards are much lower than 4gb usually... after all it's not like the iPhone has 64Mb like on your phone.. it would be nice, but again, not a big trouble.
  • No video at all - not just lack of video calling but also it's unclear if that camera will actually shoot video for storing on the internal memory and transferring off later.
    We have not even seen how the camera works and you already know it won't shoot video ??
Frankly, as any devices there will be things that are not quite right and things to complain. But I can't believe the amount of criticism, mostly unfounded, about the iPhone...

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