Hi,

I am a little confused about the deadlines shown in the bounty section of the site.

For example, the printing system bounty seems to have a deadline of January 2011 - does that mean it`s pointless to donate?

Could someone please explain how it works?

> I am a little confused about the deadlines shown in the bounty section of the
> site. For example, the printing system bounty seems to have a deadline of
> January 2011 - does that mean it`s pointless to donate? Could someone
> please explain how it works?

"Status: Open" means that the bounty has not been assigned yet, which in turn means that the deadline is moot anyway. So for better clarity the date after "Deadline:" should be removed for bounties that are not assigned, I think. Donating should be safe however.

So, as I`m aware there are very few coders available and I`d like to get someone working on a word processor as a priority, would it be worth adding say...1000 euro to the printing system bounty.
If the money is just going to sit there then I`m not wasting it as I`m very keen to see things actually get done, as in the case of Mark`s excellent offer to fast-track the drivers, rather than just see large amounts of money wasted, like poor Trevor and his ill-fated x1000 project for example (not meant as a flame).

As you are all probably aware by now, I have a large quantity of money saved, specifically to accelerate the development of MOS, its application base and to raise its profile in general (and hopefully attract users eventually).

I am a realist (I`m actually a physicist so I`m no fool) and I don`t expect miracles but I truly believe MorphOS is beautiful work and can eventually attract new users and has a bright future as a niche OS. If I didn`t then I`d be suopporting AROS instead.

Fraggle,
Quote:

Interesting, I've been saying this for awhile, but most of the users seem to think its limited to Amiga diehards.

Fraggle,
Quote:

Do you know of the wordprocessor Scriba? I think it's a very good effort and already can be used for most normal word processing type tasks. Definately give it a try if you haven't yet. Latest version is up on Aminet:
http://aminet.net/text/edit/Scriba_0.8.0.lha

I found this software to be a really nice surprise after a lot of people bemoaning the lack of a wordprocessing program for so long. :)

[ Edited by realstar 29.09.2012 - 23:12 ]

> Do you know of the wordprocessor Scriba?

Yes, he does.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=8785&forum=32&start=3

I must admit I haven`t looked at Scriba yet as I understood it was at a very early stage and I was hoping to get the FW97 sources, however as that seems to be a non-starter perhaps Scriba is the best place to invest.

What I`ll do is check it out and contact the author to see how much time he has to work on it and whether a few Ben Franklins (or Charles Darwins where I`m from [who`s face is on a euro?] ) could really get things moving.

I was really hoping to get shaders and other OGL2 stuff worked on but Frank seems highly committed to his real life (and hell, who can blame him) so that seems unlikely to be accelerate-able (is that a word?) at any cost.

edit: I`m also still mulling over throwing some money at the printing bounty so any comments on that?

edit again: Did I say Frank? I meant Michal of course!

[ Edited by Fraggle 30.09.2012 - 11:04 ]

Fraggle,
Quote:

It is a waste of money.

MorphOS can print on Postscript and PCL5 printers which are still supported by most new printers. I frequently check computer magazins printer tests and in most cases 90% of the printers work out of the box with MorphOS and even an old AmigaOS3, when having USB or network drivers. Some of them also take PDFs via ftp.

However.we live in times where finally the needs change. For years I asked myself, why printer need a driver and since 2010 the coin flipped. Starting with the ipad the industry creates printers supporting airprint, which is a protocol to easy print out stuff without the need of a specific printer driver..While first only a few printers supported this, recently more and more hardware devekopers added support to their hardware, because millions of ios devices are finally a market to sell ink, too. Even Android supports airprint, now.

It is impossible to write specific drivers for all new printers, as new models come out faster than you can handle them. Also they need to be bought and kepted for later bug fixes.

So better spend money some something is needed. I someone wants to print, he can always get a printer which works with MorphOS out of the box, right now. Creating a bounty to get some low prices crappy printers with a short live time to work, is a bad idea.

In my oppinion airprint/ip print is the best solution for the future. One driver and done.

Unfortunatly the documentation on the protocol is quite bad, as most examples are more or less just calling ios or android functions handing over a pdf. Which on one side shows how simple it is to print, but on the other side is no help for us right now. At least I did not get it to work, yet.

Geit

I`ll save that money then, thanks for the advice.

Once again I`m highly open to any input regarding important stuff we could open bounties for which I could generously fund initially to get things going.

It is important that these things are realistic so any open office requests will be sent to NIL: lol :o)

Open Office (or Libre Office rather) is not at unrealistic.
I looked into it half a year ago and it's clearly feasible to get a basic Cairo-canvas port going which can then be progressively be turned to use native interfaces (it might be that initial port would be way too slow btw)

The main blocker for me was that the work is really boring + I would never use it myself.
I prefer to focus on stuff I would find useful myself on my MorphOS system. That's why I wrote Scribble and ported Scintilla instead of doing similar work on a word processor.

So to conclude, OO is feasible for someone with the right skills for this kind of work on MorphOS + a large dose of motivation.

I`m leaning towards Cinnamon writer at the minute, it seems exciting in its goals, is more `Amiga-like` and is of course open source. Also, according to the author`s page it should be very simple for the right person to port it to MOS. I`ve emailed him about it (no reply yet) but while a donation to him may speed development, it probably won`t get it ported to MOS so we`ll need a specific bounty for that. I think it would be better to wait until later for that so we get a more advanced version, unless we can somehow create a bounty to maintain the port for a set period (unlikely?).

Thanks for the input.

>who`s face is on a euro?

Most 1-euro coins have no person's face at all, but some have, depending on which country the mint is located in. Those faces could be of:

- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Austria)
- Primož Trubar (Slovenia)
- King Juan Carlos I (Spain)
- King Albert II (Belgium)
- Queen Beatrix (Netherlands)
- Prince Rainier III (Monaco)
- Prince Albert II (Monaco)
- Grand Duke Henri (Luxembourg)
- Pope John Paul II (Vatican)
- Pope Benedict XVI (Vatican)

:-)

Crikey, what a mess - am I the only one who misses Marks and Francs etc...?

> Cinnamon writer [...] is more `Amiga-like`

Scriba uses MUI. What does Cinnamon Writer use?

> Cinnamon writer [...] is of course open source.

It is?

I`m not sure what gfx toolkit CW uses actually, I do know the author is open to MOS port though but I see now that you are correct - it is closed source.

We`ll see how he responds to my email.

Cinammon Writer uses SDL afaik.

Fraggle - Thats why we voted no to the Euro in Denmark ;) To heck with that stuff.


As far as word processing, I think the two primary targets should be:
1: Import (and save as) MS office and open document formats
2: Export to PDF.

I don't mind libreoffice personally, it's very solid but it's also "heavy". Whether it could be changed to function in an MUI sense, who knows.

Quote:

So did anybody follow the leads from the other thread at all?

With regard to Scriba, one of my favourite dialogues is the following:

Scriba user: "The 'Del' key in your case deletes on the left of the cursor. But it should delete on the right side of the cursor."

Scriba author: "Looking at ED, I see what you mean. That's something I can change, of course."

Yeah I`m def not going with Scriba.

WRT the leads, I only tried one and got no response maybe I should try harder before cashing up the Cinnamon port.

> Cinammon Writer uses SDL afaik.

From 2.5 years ago:

"SDL is no longer used."
http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2010-04-00010-EN.html

Scriba has already got some very good features: open and save .odt documents, export to pdf, handle the pictures within the document, basic textformatting, lists, properly working del key etc. And as far as I know, it is continuously being developed nowadays, which is a useful characteristic of it.

Hey Fraggle,
Cinnamon Writer looks like the more feature filled, mature program.
Why don't you donate some money to it and maybe offer a bounty for the MorphOS port?
The author apparently doesn't think porting it would be a major undertaking.

I haven't been able to actually open an odt file yet in Scriba. It does get updated quickly so who knows, maybe it'll become something useful ?

Hi all,

I`ve received a response from the Cinnamon writer author and he is open to and is in fact working on a MOS port (I`m sure he won`t mind my saying so here) but he doesn`t have a MOS machine to test on ATM.

He is not keen on having lumps of money thrown at him until his work is approved by the community which I consider very noble, so I think he should be provided with a machine, perhaps a mac mini or an old powermac (with or even without a licence I guess would be sufficient). I can provide this or perhaps someone else has something available to offer? Then, once we have evaluated Cinnamon writer and determined that it is a good investment, I (we?) can start giving him money.

What do you all think?

Where is he located, Germany?