<document><section><section.title>Welcome to the Conglomerate editor proof of concept</section.title><introduction>Well, here we are. This is the <emph>pre-release</emph> Conglomerate editor.  It is just meant to give you a feel for how editing structured information with the future release can be like - <disclaimer>I don't expect serious users to be able to do much with it in its current state.</disclaimer></introduction><admission>You see, the internals are butt ugly.</admission> My explanation for this is as follows:<p/>Simplemente Soluciones, our company, was going to make a digital/paper publishing system for a client. To be able to use this system, the client needed an XML editor, like this one. Fair enough, so we <corporate>subcontracted</corporate> it. Twice. Both attempts failed miserably, ending in programmers saying things like <quote>"It can't be done!"</quote> or <quote>"Uaaergh."</quote><p/>This is where I came in. I'd already made the output backend, and I decided to try to patch things up so we wouldn't get in trouble with the client (we were already a couple of weeks overdue).<p/><quote>"I'll make a rudimentary editor, with just the basic features,"</quote> I said. "One that can be used like it's supposed to, but without the bells 'n whistles." I'd already taken a look at the GTK pages and found out there was a working Windows port that I could use when the clients decided to say <quote>"Damn you, we're not installing Linux!"</quote><p/>Apart from what little I gleaned from the official pages during a long night of thinking about the consequences of accepting a task like this, I knew nothing about the GTK API.  <admission>Being a person of considerable ego, though, I figured I could learn it as I went.</admission> This more or less worked, and after three weeks I had the basic editor view.<p/><excuse>I didn't have much time to think about design, though. The more hacks I added to make it do what the client wanted (<quote>"Oh, forget about rudimentary. We want the real thing, and we don't mind you spending another week to make it."</quote>), the less intelligible the source became.</excuse> <admission>In the end I was stuck with just a heap of hacks.</admission><p/>It grew. Money over beauty. I started debugging. In the meantime, me and Joakim (the man behind the original specification and interface design for the editor) were dreaming ourselves out of our predicament, trying to come up with useful aspects of the editor to keep motivation up. The result was Conglomerate. This is something we actually care a lot about, and we envision a bright future for it, as soon as I can replace the editor code with something sensible. Take a look at the current code to see what I mean. <admission>You'll need a strong stomach, though.</admission><p/>As a user, you'll see the cursor do odd stuff now and then. <excuse>This is completely normal.</excuse> <request>If you are unhappy about this behaviour, though, you can submit a patch to me that fixes it, or wait for the <optimistic>late-january</optimistic> release.</request><p/>I thank you for your attention. <inspirational>In the end, Conglomerate will make us all proud. And happy, I think.</inspirational><section.signature>-Hans Petter Jansson (hpj@simplemente.net)</section.signature></section></document>
