On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Bob Arning wrote:
If you want to try something a bit different in browsing, check out:
http://www.charm.net/~arning/BobsBrowser.txt
Note: the more you like categories, the less you may like my offering.
Hi Bob. I meant to respond to your posting earlier, and I was just going through my old emails and noticed it.
Thanks for the change set pointer... I tried it out and it is a nice break from the traditional Smalltalk browser. The thing I like the most about it is that you have a lot more room to view more code at a time. You could even have 5 or 6 of your browsers open at once. I don't know if I'd like it as much for browsing though an unfamiliar class (where it's nice to be able to see the method & method category list while you're browsing)... although I suppose if I can keep a method list window open separately, that still works pretty well.
I have some ideas for a somewhat different system browser that I'm tempted to try to write in Squeak... kind of a pet project that I've been thinking about for awhile. The basic idea is to attack the problem that Smalltalk browsers have with only being able to see one method's source at a time. It's a little bit related to how yours works, except that you'd have a single class hierarchy always visible, and you could select multiple classes from that, which would appear in a "stack", and then you could select multiple methods from the classes, which would appear in another stack. It would need to take up most of the screen... the idea being that you would only run one of these browsers at a time, instead of having multiple regular browsers open at once (so you woulnd't have the wasted space of same category/class panes in multiple browsers).
Anyway, it's easier to draw on a sheet of paper than to describe verbally. I just need to get around to prototyping it sometime soon...
- Doug Way EAI/Transom Technogies, Ann Arbor, MI dway@eai.com, dway@mat.net http://www.transom.com
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