| I feel much the same. Even on OS X the potential of NeXTstep remains largely unrealized as most apps do not take advantage of the APIs in a way that allows leveraging heterogeneous apps into a conceived workflow. As a result, a fantastic opportunity to create an environment that is composable in a consistent, homogeneous manner is wasted. What is worse is that such an environment does not exist anywhere in computing. The closest thing that exists to realizing an entirely composable or scriptable environment is emacs, and that environment has not incorporated progress in graphics into its ecosystem. Consequently, the capacity to compose workflows that interact with graphics is not possible, leading to a reliance on console style UIs for the most part. I think that GNUstep losing steam has less to do with people who care choosing OS X and more to do with Gnome and KDE having a head of steam already by the time GNUstep came about, a characteristic that has lead to many cases of used technology being a consequence of circumstance rather than merit. I just want an entirely scriptable, composable computing environment anywhere, and it is maddening that such does not exist as everyone would benefit from such. Currently users either have to remain attached to a UNIX CLI userspace that does have composability or only have that composability in a small subset of applications due to the lack of a uniform interface in which to do so. What computers are best at is what is least accessible in computing presently, leading to people having to do automatable tasks manually. It's a tragedy that such is the case after decades of examples of how to achieve that being partially implemented. Computing has even regressed greatly in this regard in the past decade due to giving our generated data to gatekeepers, when the data was local machines at least then we could apply rules to the data to transform it according to the user's whims, such as filtering out noise in a RSS feed, automating archival of useful information etc. Now users are entirely reliant on the gatekeepers allowing them to transform information, often which is neither possible or comes accompanied with distracting ads or other attention parasites. I would gladly switch to an ecosystem that realized the vision NeXTstep et al. had so that managing complexity and transforming data did not entail abandoning solidly engineered GUI applications in the process, sadly this is another case where computing has been unsuccessful in achieving ambitious goals. |
1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nrZiJph6SU&sns=em
2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAMTomxQV80&sns=em
3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erVREtQoMCc&sns=em