[Ipe-discuss] "Ipe", ported by ....

[Otfried Cheong]

I had a mindboggling experience yesterday that I thought I should
share with this list: Trolltech has announced the winners of their
Qt/Mac programming contest.  Imagine my surprise, to find, in the
section "several other programs also deserve mentioning", the
following entry: "Ipe, a drawing editor for creating figures for PDF,
ported by Markus Bongard."

You can still find this original press release at:
http://www.embeddedstar.com/press/content/2004/7/embedded15353.html

I sent them email pointing out that Ipe compiles out of the box on the
Mac, that several people on this list use Ipe/Mac, and that I've first
seen it running under Qt/Mac in March 2003.  They first took Ipe
entirely off the webpage, and now say that "Porting to the Mac usually
requires a bit of extra work to match the Apple guide lines
completely, and the ported applications were judged by this too.
[...] he actually had done some work to make it work completely on the
Mac and through that make it fully available to all Mac users."  So
Ipe is back on their webpage (www.trolltech.com --> Latest News), but
at least the name of its author is mentioned as well.

Has anyone here actually tried Markus' "port"?  I'd be interested to
hear from Mac users about the improved Mac compatibility.  Too bad
that he's not publishing his patches (surely a breach of the GPL), and
that he is not maintaining the port (it's preview 12, misleadingly
labeled "release candidate 12" --- if that's a release candidate then
I'm George W.)  In case anyone wonders -- I do plan a release without
the "preview" word in it, but only once it deserves the name.

Cheers,
  Otfried