h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...and he certainly has done so for me and Jonny. We've both decided to collaborate on a WYSIWYG editor. I've now sussed out a way to do it and Jonny is providing expert help with C++. So could you do us a favour, Matt, and stick up references to the 'GuideDog' project (see my home page) on the Nescafe-encrusted front of the Caffeine machine (next to the 'this machine stole my 20p!' note )?

Ta
The FM

That's great! I'm currently pottering about with porting GuidePost over to .NET in C#, but there's obviously the problem there with nobody having the runtimes for it yet... still, it's fun and eventually it'll run on quite a few OSes without too much trouble (I hope) assuming System.Windows.Forms and System.Xml get ported properly, and that Ximian's Mono project or Portable.NET get a reasonably complete framework implemented. Plus there's Microsoft and Corel working on FreeBSD and Mac OS runtimes, so fingers crossed.

Of course, the other thing is that if you two cover Windows, I can concentrate on Linux and the related UNIX-alikes

I shall add your info to the Caffeine Machine.

"Of course, the other thing is that if you two cover Windows, I can concentrate on Linux and the related UNIX-alikes."

Thank goodness for that, I was wondering how we were going to do that!

* looks suspicious *

Are you being sarcastic?

No, sorry, I honestly meant I've not got a clue how to program for Linux! We seem to be using windows components a lot, so I was wondering how it would transfer to Linux.

I think it's fair to say that this is an 'engineering' rather than a programming job, in that we are gluing together lots of different components to make an editor. God only knows whether these components will run on Linux, but since virtually everybody who has a computer at home and is afraid of GuideML and other 'technologies' will be running Windows, we probably have a lot of the bases covered.

Yes, apart from the Mac users.

And there's a lot to be said for making decent applications for Linux as well - there is the whole promotion of Linux-on-the-desktop to think of, after all

And to be honest, the only way I know how to program for Windows is in Delphi (which costs money and I only have a rather old version) and C#, which I'm just learning. Linux programming is really rather easy when you get down to it...

Well like I said, I'm glad you can do that because I've never even seen Linux used! We'll let you deal with Linux, and we'll cover Windows. I'm fairly sure that when we get something done it will use Windows only components which will be a major headache to adapt for Linux - so we'll leave that to you.

Adapt? Hard? More like impossible. When I find some time, I've got some interesting plans for writing a WYSIWYG editor using GTK+ 2, because the TextView widget seems to have the capabilities I need - if I plug it into either libXML and libXSLT or some custom-written code to do a similar thing (they might prove to be overkill), I should actually be able to pull off something similar to what you're attempting to do - I'll just be using Pango's formatting language instead of XHTML within the editor control.

I don't think our objective ought to be the promotion of Linux on the desktop, admirable though that may be! I'm quite happy to meet those objectives I set out on my personal space, and also to ease the job of Scouts such as myself who have to wade through lots of typos/misspelling/bad formatting etc.
It would be interesting to see, from a comparative standpoint, how easy the development process for each platform teurns out to be. It might even put a stop to these sterile 'my OS is better than yours' arguments that people seem to get into.

I wasn't advocating that you promote Linux on the desktop, but rather that being able to develop purely for Linux means that I can do that. Why should you promote something you don't even use? That would be hypocrisy, not to mention that if you don't use Linux on the desktop, you probably don't know enough about it to promote it effectively.

But enough of that, let's keep channels of communication open and see if some of what we learn can be used to assist each other, even though we won't be using the same technologies at all.

Of course, I can't start right now as I don't have time, but it's only a month until all my exams and stuff are over, and I intend to get cracking on this over the summer...

It's a pity one can't get IE on Linux, as I've found recently that it offers an extremely rich and flexible programming environment. Then maybe we could kill two birds with one stone by consolidating various parts of the system. In fact, I'd go as far to say IE 6.0 is *too* rich and powerful, giving one *too* many options for solving the problem. IE's developers obviously decided that the best way to 'skin a cat' was to offer the equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife.

I'd suggest we move things forward by recognising that instead of running lots of little projects to address various niche issues, that we are probably better off getting together and running one *big* project that will seek to clarify objectives, prioritise them, and then set out to meet them, whether by individual or collaborative effort. Rather like the ethos which lay behind GNU and the Stone Soup Group.

We need a home page for the project. I'm quite happy to write one if all are agreeable?

The FM

How about the GuideML Editor Writer's Caffiene Machine?

Gosh! What a great idea!
No, seriously folks, at the moment we are a ragbag of developers beavering away on our own little projects, and the Caffeine Machine does little more than advertise our lack of coordination to others. Both you and Frankie Roberto have independently produced previewers, which is good, but I'm suggesting a more coordinated approach, so we all don't end up pulling in different directions.

On another topic, have a look at Element Behaviours in IE 5.0. I think these will handle most of the formatting issues for us.

Well, that sounds fine to me, but I'll still just be tagging around the edges. I will eventually try and match your feature set, but there's not going to be any real way to share code between Windows and Linux projects using these technologies.

Not that I'm particularly cut up about it, I do enjoy a challenge.

Yes, FM. I'm just wrestling with HTML in VB at the moment, I'm trying to find a VB specific MSHTML tutorial on the Microsoft Website but I'm not having much luck. I'll try again in a minute. I'm sure that once I've worked out how to use it, that's the key to our project.

There isn't really a VB specific MSHTML tutorial: I think that the package was envisaged before MS had a grand clear-out of all the geeks and nerds who thought that real programmers only used C++. I'm sort of groping my way around in the dark and banging into things at the moment.

Anyway, best of luck to the pair of you. We might as well be resigned to the fact that progress is going to be slow initially.

FM

Slow? Non-existant here, too much else to do, and I don't even have the necessary libraries that I want to use installed on my Linux box right now...

Well, best of luck with your exams to the pair of you. I was there a long time ago, and was such a masochist I went back for second and even third helpings.

Yes, I'm already at the second optional stage... and I'm considering a PhD. Nuts, nuts, nuts...