As one of the writers of an early Look-n-Feel for Squeak, I've followed this thread
pretty closely.

First off, I agree that Henrik's antialiased fonts look great and seem to do a lot
to make the environment look more "mature".  It would be neat to have this built in
as a preference, if that's possible.

I think too that the skins notion, while interesting to see and experience, is not
really the right way to go here.  As an author of some skins code, it is worth
saying here that the work I did almost a year ago now was really just my way of
experimenting with what was possible in Morphic.  I was hoping that it would
stimulate some thinking about a better tool kit look and feel.  What I encountered
while writing the code was compelling evidence that the framework of the look and
feel in Squeak Morphic needs additional refinement.  The browsers hierarchy is still
too explicit for my taste.  A very worthy project would be one where the Browser
hierarchy gets another refactoring pass with the idea of easy extensibility is built
in.  Get rid of many of the explicit browser class names!

A really cool framework for the look and feel would allow bit mapped components
(which I did in some of my skins), scaled components, and drawn (is it called
vectored?) components with free inter changeability.  This way we could have a more
contemporary look and provide mechanisms for high customization by the end users.

The earlier mentioned notion that we should take care to not sacrifice portability I
highly agree with.  As an old Digitalk Smalltalk user I was first put off by the
look and feel I encountered when working with VisualWorks.  Somehow Smalltalk/V
seemed more familiar.  And Squeak feels even more abstracted than VisualWorks to
me.  But nowadays I really appreciate what's there and long for ways to make the IDE
seem both familiar and highly extensible.

Just wanted to weigh in with some thoughts....

 - Steve