3 Overview

Gorm is an application for creating the user interface (and possibly entire applications) for a GNUstep application. Initially a close clone of the old NeXTstep 3.3 Interface Builder application, I expect that Gorm will mutate beyond the capabilities of that app.

GNUstep is an object-oriented programming framework and a collection of tools developed for or using the GNUstep libraries.

You can find out more about GNUstep at http://www.gnustep.org

The basic idea behind Gorm is simple - it provides a graphical user interface with which to connect together objects from the GNUstep libraries (as well as custom-written objects) and set their attributes in an easy to use manner.

The collection of objects is then saved as a document which can either be re-loaded into Gorm for further editing, or can be loaded into a running GNUstep application in order to provide that application with a user interface or some subsystem.

3.1 What You Must Know To Understand This Manual

This manual assumes a working knowledge of Objective-C and C. These are necessary prerequisites to understanding some of the technical details and examples given here.

3.1.1 Major features

• Drag-and-drop creation of GUI elements from palettes.
• Run-time loading of additional palettes that may be written using an API very similar to that of Apple/NeXTs interface Builder palette API.
• Direct on-screen manipulation of GUI elements
• Manipulation and examination of objects via inspectors.
• Drag-and-drop creation of connections between objects.
• Interactive test mode for interfaces/object-networks under development.
• Saving data in a format loadable by GNUstep applications.

3.2 About this Manual

This manual is ment to cover basic operation of the Gorm application. It is not meant to be a complete tutorial on GNUstep programming.