Hi Stephen!

> Stephen Pair [SMTP:spair at advantive.com] said: 
I like the policies idea.  

[some has been stuff snipped]
> I think time is better spent improving the Squeak UI rather than making it
> look like other UIs (of course others may find it worthwile to emulate
> other
> windowing systems).
> 
[snip]
> To me, the ultimate would be to have many native OS windowing systems
> wrappered and available if desired.  Tools and applications could come in
> several UI flavors: MVC, Morphic, or any of a number of host windowing
> systems.
> 
[Norton, Chris]  That's the idea.  I don't want to preclude native windows /
widget support, but rather I'd like to encourage some enterprising
Squeak-hacker to implement it in a generic way (Policy wrappers!).  If a
nice framework were in place, then I suspect the native support would soon
follow (some native support prototypes already exist, I believe).  I can
understand your reluctance to implement multiple look policies for a single
platform for all widgets.  However, it might be very useful to implement
such a policy for a few widgets.

Here's a great daydream: what if we could create a new application using
Squeak and set the look policies to "apply native look policies if they are
available".  Thus, on an OS like Windoze, my Squeak app would approximate
any other commercially available software.  But it would also run with the
same functionality on a Unix box with no native support.  On that platform,
the look policies would default to "generic" which, of course, would either
be MVC or Morphic.

In order for Squeak to become widely accessible, I believe that it must
support native controls and API calls for at least one or two platforms.  If
we could produce "ready to sell" applications with Squeak, we could convince
our respective employers that Squeak is a viable development environment.
As it is today, Squeak is really cool, but it's a toy / research tool.  I
don't know about your company, but mine won't be porting to Squeak anytime
soon.

However, it would really be cool if somebody with real graphics design
talent were to look over the existing Squeak widgets and create a new "look
policy" for some / all available widgets.  We could trade these policies
with each other and come up with a huge repository of look policies!  I
expect that human-to-software interface will change rapidly over the next
few years (if history is any guide).  Plug & play look policies would ensure
that Squeak is forever on the vanguard of technology.

---==> Chris