Achieving escape velocity

Doug Way dway at mat.net
Mon Apr 12 19:19:47 UTC 1999


So many questions!  There probably aren't good answers to all of your
questions, but here are a few, anyway...

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999 shaping at bigfoot.com wrote:

> Has anyone considered making the window's maximize and close controls
change
> their visual condition as the mouse passes over them, to indicate when
the
> mouse click will work?   Can I close a window with a command key?  This
> would be useful (I keep hitting the Alt-F4 :-) ).

You can't close a window with a command key currently.  You could probably
do this with a little Morphic programming by having SystemWindow check for
a specific #keyStroke event of your choice.  (I haven't tried this
myself.)

Customizing it so that the Morphic titlebar controls change as the mouse
passes over is probably easier... add a line to SystemWindow>>initialize
like "closeBox on: #mouseEnter send: #highlightCloseBox: to: self.", and
then create SystemWindow>>highlightCloseBox: which does something like
"closeBox color: Color blue." to highlight it, etc.

> Does everyone agree that those little circles that appear at window
borders
> to indicate that you can now resize the window (if you are agile enough)
are
> very difficult to use?  Am I missing something?  Sometimes, I need
twenty to
> thirty seconds to get a grip on my window border.  I'm working at 1280 x
> 1024.

I generally agree... the MVC resizing cursors are nicer looking, and
easier to activate than the Morphic "yellow dots" (part of this is
probably just because MVC is faster).  I imagine the yellow dot thing is
something brought over from the original Morphic from the Self project,
but I'm not sure.  If the threshold for making the yellow dots appear were
adjusted to make them show up more easily, that would be an improvement...

Aside from the resizing thing, I generally like working in Morphic more
than MVC, though.

> Has anyone been able to use a scroll-wheel mouse with Squeak?  I would
like
> to use my Logitech Marble Plus.  This has the trackball under the thumb
and
> three buttons, the middle one being a clickable scroll wheel.

I don't know of anyone who's done this.  This would probably involve a
fair amount of work... VM programming, dealing with the mouse drivers,
etc.

> I filed-in the Windoze 2-1-1 stuff, but it affected window attributes in
> only one of my projects (the one with the introductory materials and
> examples) and not windows in the Morphic projects.   Why is this?

Ah yes, the "Windoze" 2-1-1 addon is only for MVC, not Morphic, which is
why you're not seeing it in the Morphic projects.  MVC is the default
windowing environment that Squeak starts up in.  If you're not clear on
which is which, remember that MVC window title bars have the square
controls, and Morphic window title bars have the X and O.  MVC scrollbars
are white, Morphic scrollbars are blue/gray, etc.

To avoid frustration in general, I would recommend either programming in
Morphic or MVC, and not mixing the two too much.  If you're in a Morphic
project, you have access to all of the same tools (browsers, etc) that are
available in MVC, by using open/browser from the menu, etc.  (The fixes I
suggested above are only for Morphic, not MVC.)

Personally, I think the Morphic scrollbars now behave closely enough to
Windows that the "Windoze" file-in is not that necessary, especially if
you set "inboardScrollbars" to true under Help/Edit Preferences.  You
could do a little tweaking to the ScrollBar class to make them a little
larger, change the colors, and remove the menu button if you really
wanted.  Title bars are a different matter, although you can easily remove
the titlebar-click-to-rename "problem" by commenting out the line "label
on: #mouseDown send: #relabel to: self" in SystemWindow>>initialize, which
improves things somewhat.

- Doug Way
  EAI/Transom Technogies, Ann Arbor, MI
  dway at eai.com, dway at mat.net
  http://www.transom.com

  Smalltalk: Guaranteed Y2T Compliant





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