David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

Once in a while, someone sees GNOME Do and screams bloody murder that I’ve “stolen” something from Quicksilver or that I’ve “cloned” or “forked” Quicksilver and simply renamed it and that I’m trying to hide the similarities. It’s not enough, these people cry, that I mention Quicksilver on Do’s homepage and discuss the technical differences between Do and Quicksilver at length in my design document, which includes the following page:

Does it look like I’m trying to hide something?

Quicksilver was my favorite program on Mac OS X — which I’ve used since Public Beta 1. I’ve probably installed QS on over thirty of my friends’ computers. There would be no GNOME Do without it. But Quicksilver isn’t perfect, and there had never really been a Linux equivalent. So, I figured, why not spend my senior year of college exploring a program that fascinates me, and what better way to explore a program than to try to write it myself? I could release it as free software so everyone could use it and learn from it (Quicksilver was closed-source at the time), and best of all, my school will give me credit for it. So I wrote GNOME Do, and (1) got the Quicksilver functionality I longed for on Linux, (2) learned a lot about free and open source software, (3) met some incredible people, (4) got college credit, and (5) had a lot of fun.

I’m not sure what it is about this whole situation that has some Mac users foaming at the mouth, calling for my flesh to be branded with a “QS” so that everyone will know my crime. It’s really off-putting. On Linux, this kind of work, when done well, is considered a good thing for the community and society at large. My hope is that someday, a brave young student reads everything I’ve written about GNOME Do, “steals” everything I put into it, and makes something faster or smarter or different with it. It seems that the Mac community considers this a terrible, terrible thing to do — after all, WWSJD? By the way, a friend of mine got Do running on Leopard two months ago.

It has been 41 days since we released GNOME Do 0.4.2, and today I’m honored to present GNOME Do 0.5: “The Fighting 0.5″. Without further ado, here are the main improvements and new features, accompanied by plenty of sexy screenshots (click for larger images).

First off, the Open with… action has been re-enabled!

The biggest new feature in GNOME Do 0.5 is our new preferences window and plugin manager. You can now browse, download, install, and enable or disable all available plugins from right within Do thanks to Mono.Addins:

After spending eight months on GNOME Do, I gave a brief presentation (followed by a great, not-so-brief Q&A session) to an auditorium full of Computer Science students and faculty. In the presentation, I discuss five “rules” explicitly and implicitly imposed in undergraduate Computer Science coursework that I had to break in order to create GNOME Do. I urge students studying Computer Science to break these rules too, by getting involved in free and open source software projects.