Re: Wishlist of apps to port?

On 9/23/25 02:50, Ethan C wrote:
> I've always thought that it would be good to try to port macOS 
> applications to GNUstep, for a few reasons:
>
>   * It shows that GNUstep is complete enough to port real applications
>   * It helps show us in which areas we are weak or strong at
>   * It could potentially get us new users, especially for users who
>     are migrating from macOS to GNU/Linux or who use multiple
>     operating systems regularly
>
> The current wishlist on the wiki does not really have many good ideas 
> for existing applications to port, so I looked for some high-quality 
> Objective-C + AppKit applications that might be interesting (see the 
> wishlist below). I'd like to hear your thoughts.
>
In fact, there are quite a few very interesting projects but which are 
rarely mentioned anywhere and thus languish unnecessarily.

There also is a short list at https://wiki.debian.org/DebianGNUstep 
which includes the following music notation software rooted in NeXTSTEP 
and later OPENSTEP:

Calliope Music Notation Editor

https://web.archive.org/web/20020207022333/http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk:80/~wfc/calliope.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20011214163302/http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk:80/~wfc/calliope-further.html
https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/audio/editor/_Calliope.3981.README.html

    Originally developed on NeXSTEP, it appears to since have been 
ported to OPENSTEP 4.2, with further work begun to make it compile on 
MacOS X and also create a GNUstep version:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/calliopemusic/
https://sourceforge.net/p/calliopemusic/news/

     Work appears to have stalled in 2009 and the code base was 
copied/migrated to github:

https://github.com/leighsmith/calliopemusic
https://github.com/leighsmith/MusicKit

For people still running NeXTSTEP (works great in the previous emulator 
http://previous.nextcommunity.net/), Calliope can be easily installed, 
but ultimately requires a commercial music font named Sonata which is 
not freely available anywhere. So there is also an urgent need to create 
a free music notation font, either from existing variants (Lilypond, 
MusicTeX, ?) or from scratch. See 
https://sourceforge.net/p/calliopemusic/mailman/message/642669/ for details.

This certainly is a very difficult endeavour to undertake, but it could 
have the potential of becoming the first killer app GNUstep is still 
sorely missing.

Current project maintainer Leigh Smith has been added in stealth mode 
via BCC in case he might be interested to weigh in somehow.

Regards,
Paul Seelig