On Jan 25, 2008 8:09 PM, Juan Vuletich juan@jvuletich.org wrote:
To me, the big WOW! is: "The framework is fully in Smalltalk; there are no "primitive" widgets or hidden functionality.
Most of the GUI frameworks I work with are like this, so that's why I wasn't wowed by it.
This means that there are no restrictions to how a morph will appear and react. There are morphs that behave like the widgets usually found, and therefore conventional interfaces can be built.
Yes, Morphs are definitely more "alive" then components from other systems (though in a live system like Smalltalk I would expect nothing less).
But there are more interesting visual metaphors like CurveMorph, FishEyeMorph, EnvelopeEditorMorph, or SpectrumAnalyzerMorph (see the next section with a Squeak at hand to know them). And the framework is open end extensible. It s not difficult to make new visual metaphors for our own objects, which are perfectly integrated in the system. This makes Morphic the ideal environment to experiment, learn and write new styles in user interfaces, breaking away from what commercial programming tools allows us to do."
Commercial programming tools allow you to do much of this now. In fact C# can even add methods to built in classes. The rest of the world is catching up! :)
Have you seen the ARK and Self videos? Maybe they enlighten you.
I did. Honestly after using your pointers to dig a bit deeper, I guess I like Morphic over all and see it already has some of the things I wanted to implement. Needs a major spring cleaning though (hence the millions of projects to do so). :)