The renewed eXpert Zone features an interview with Vanders, the main developer of the AtheOS fork Syllable. He speaks of Syllable’s origins, it’s future, it’s applications and more.
Interview With Main Syllable Developer Vanders
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
a good interview….glad to see syllable is keeping moving right along 🙂
Good interview, Youlle!
The Beish window decorator I’ve been fiddling around with, as mentioned in the article, can be downloaded here:
http://msa.section.me.uk/syllable/beish-update.tgz
Screenshot: http://msa.section.me.uk/syllable/beish-update.gif
Similarly, the QEMU bundles, for running Syllable under Windows (or other OSes) without any partitioning hassles can be found here:
http://msa.section.me.uk/syllable/qemu/
Enjoy!
I think a gtk port would be very useful to port stuff like abiword or gimp as a intermediate stop gap measure. just like abrowse which doesnt prevent anyone from porting firefox, any amount of gtk apps wouldnt prevent syllable toolkit from being used or why gtk itself couldnt be the native toolkit of syllable
Syllable is not a fork of AtheOS. It is the next generation athos because atheOS is a DEAD OS (there are no development nowadays).
Just because the other project is dead now doesn’t mean it takes the “forked” status away from the current project.
Even the guys involved in AtheOS said in the AtheOS mailing list: “ok, let’s fork”.
Marcelo, taken from the Syllable about page:
“Syllable was born in July 2002 as a fork of the AtheOS operating system. Several AtheOS developers, concerned about the long-term development of AtheOS, created Syllable to ensure that development would continue.”
Seems like the people at Syllable don’t agree with you…
updated interview, added a Q&A i forgot to include.
I believe Syllable should concentrate on the existing “toolkit” rather than porting GTK or Qt. For me if I wanted GTK or Qt application, I’d rather use Linux and Xwindows. GTK will just lead to the reduction of Syllable operating speed. It is not about the availability of application but about good, difference and fast desktop OS, if not, Linux, WinXXX, OSX are there already.
it’s nice to have a very cool OS sitting on your hard disk and be happy that’s so cool. but sometimes i really want to be productive. what is the use of a computer without applications? it’s about the user experience, the user normally don’t care which toolkit the program uses as long as it’s well integrated. so having a GTK/QT port running on xserver or drawing unix whiches would be stupid. but QT programs on windows have a native look and feel. to have only pure syllable software is nice, but you have to get an user base and therefor you need good applications. a GTK or QT port would be cool (GTK is more important than QT). but i fully understand, that the syllable developers don’t want to spend time with this. discouraging a port of GTK, QT or other toolkits is not very helpful, if anybody would like to spend time with it you should encourage her.
“GTK is more important than QT”
Please give some foundation to this argument.
I don’t want to start a flame war. I even prefer KDE, which is based in QT, rather than Gnome/GTK.
I just would like to know why do you think GTK is more important than QT in the Syllable world. To me, it makes as much sense to port QT as to port GTK. There are tons of really good and useful applications based on QT. Of course, you may have a valid point, which I’d like to read.
It’s version 0.5.4 #@$¤£% so cool off!
You make it sound like GTK/QT is some god’s gift to mankind, and it’s the only way to get some sw for Syllable. Well, it’s not!
If you want to see a GTK port on Syllable, then go port it. Nobody can stop you, and you don’t need Vanders to say “ohh, that soooo cooool”. There’s a port of GTK on Windows, and I’m sure MS didn’t make it, so what’s stopping you, from porting it?
I’ve used GTK apps on Windows.. disgusting.
GTK is not really cross-platform. It looks/acts freaky on any non-X11/*NIX platfrom.
>> “GTK is more important than QT”
> Please give some foundation to this argument.
It’s just my impression that there is more importantant software based on GTK than on QT, but this is my personal oppinion :-). Problem with GTK is that there is not really a good port of it which integrates well with the native widgets. QT is a real cross-platform toolkit, GTK is a xserver toolkit.
my point is:
– availability of software is very important
– there is more software which is cross-platform
– porting everything to syllable native “toolkit” is much much more work than the OS project itself. who should do it?
also:
appearance is not the biggest usability problem, more important is behaviour and human interface guidelines.
i feal i have no real answer to this discussion. but i feel the syllable community should be more open to GTK/QT/wxWidgets/… ports to syllable.
I thought it was pretty obvious: at the moment its the only robust user interface toolkit that is freely cross-platform and can essentially be used in whatever kind of project, closed, opened, commercial, free software, without restriction. When I say ‘robust,’ I really mean robust: there are very few toolkits with all the right mixings that can be used to make high-end applications with’em. Qt is another toolkit that can, but its license limits it to a smaller subset.
It does, of course, have a terrible Windows implementation, but that’s nothing that can’t be fixed – take a good, hard look at Java Swing applications on Mac OS X.
A wxWidgets prot that wrapped the original toolkit might be more popular than a GTK port.
one of the major benefits of Syllable, as indeed of any other Free/Libre Open Source Software operating system, is that it makes Microsoft just that little bit more paranoid …
After all, they can take a swing at Linux, but as we’ve seen, they take great care to miss FreeBSD, and the rest of the *BSD. Throwing in additional targets such as Syllable, AROS, Haiku, etc, should be enough to convince them to give up and join the fun.
A second benefit is that on one hand, anyone with the time and the desire can port OpenOffice to Syllable. Or for that matter, they can write their own Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation software, desktop database – as long as it’s not Access-style!
That’s part of what we mean by Freedom.
it’s nice to have a very cool OS sitting on your hard disk and be happy that’s so cool. but sometimes i really want to be productive. what is the use of a computer without applications?
WinXXX/Linux/OSX is alrady there for your productivity purposes. What make the different from Linux if there are just the port of “existing” GTK application to Syllable? It is beeter if Syllable do it in it’s own way of doing things rather than taking short cut.
By the way GTK is not “everything” the world can give.