[etoys-dev] Another pass in the Etoys Reference Manual: tiles

[rita]

Hi Ed,

at the moment, I don't have the time to look through your changes. The 
common tiles chapter hasn't been in need for additions, so I have to 
look what you added and find out if it will stay there. Please stop 
making additions before I have the time to look it up. I don't want you 
to do work that will be removed later.

We will not split up the common tiles chapter for this manual, this is 
the chapter for the nearly universal categories. I will look through 
your comments about unusable tiles or functions you can not determine. 
This will be very helpful, since we want the reader to understand the 
manual.
The programming tool chapter needs to be part of another manual. This 
manual will stay in the shape we decided when we started it and then we 
can have part two, which focuses on the Etoys-squeak relation. Feel free 
to create the new manual, or do you want me to do it?

Greetings,
Rita

On Mon, 3 Dec 2012 12:51:19 -0500, Edward Mokurai Cherlin wrote:
> I looked at the Viewer categories for every object in the Object
> Catalog, and at the Squeak lists of categories and tiles, and
> documented every tile in every category I found as much as I could in
> the Common Tiles chapter of the Etoys Reference Manual. I have not
> updated the introduction to the chapter yet. It is incorrect in 
> saying
> that some categories are explained only in the Objects chapter.
>
> Now I have some questions.
>
> 1) Should we split the Common Tiles chapter, as we split the Objects
> chapters, so that we have a chapter for the nearly universal
> categories that every Morph has (but not, for example, the Kedama
> objects), and another for all of the categories specific to 
> individual
> objects and small groups of objects? In the draft chapter, the
> boundary is at section 4.18, on book navigation. Near the beginning 
> of
> the chapter there is an image of the category menu for Morphs, and a
> list of categories for specific object types that do not appear on 
> the
> list for Morphs.
>
> 2) There are a number of tiles whose effects I could not determine
> from the help text or through experiment, and some that appear to be
> so buggy as to be unusable. I have made notes in the draft on all of
> them, mostly in Formatted (monospace on colored background) text. Any
> assistance on interpreting these, or filing bug reports, would be
> welcome. At some point I mean to look at their Squeak implementations
> (via 'show code textually' on the Scripting Editor menu, and
> 'selectors containing it'  on the control-click menu for text
> selections) to see whether they are any more illuminating.
>
> 3) Some of the help text clearly needs to be rewritten to, you know, 
> help.
>
> 4) I am about to write the chapter on Programming Tools, which will
> begin by describing every Squeak tool accessible from any Etoys menu,
> such as the System Browser, and tools for viewing Senders,
> Implementors, Selectors, and so on provided on the World menu and the
> open... and authoring... menus that it gives access to. I intend to
> describe the Morphic and Etoys-Scripting classes, also, to some
> extent, and then stop. I do mean to write more about the
> implementation of Etoys in Squeak, but in other books, which we can
> discuss. For example, I have thought about a chapter on writing 
> Squeak
> in text-mode scripting tiles in an Etoys User Manual or Etoys By
> Example, so that we can discuss concretely teaching more advanced
> programming and Computer Science topics on the basis of Etoys.
>
> 5) Then I intend to go over the entire book again, with the benefit 
> of
> what I have learned. Presumably I will have more questions at that
> point.