Squeak IDE Look-n-Feel

Kevin Fisher kgf at golden.net
Tue Dec 12 12:33:09 UTC 2000


> Stephane Ducasse <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
> >...But I'm really wondering why the blue look or some other nice 
> >enhancements that  already improve the basic look in MVC are not 
> >included in the release.
> >
> >All the people to which I show squeak over the two last year told me the same.
> >Open Squeak alone is depressing because the look is ugly.
> 
> That is my experience too. 
> 
> However, when I tried to identify exactly what the problem was, I decided that 
> "native widgets" like Asim suggested were not the answer. I don't want Squeak 
> to look like Windows, or KDE, or Swing or whatever. VisualWorks does the native 
> widget emulation thing well, and still does not look all that good. I want Squeak to 
> look better than any of these.

If I might just throw my 0x02 in the hat for a moment..

I was thinking of native GTK+ widgets for Squeak a few months ago.  But then I 
thought:  wouldn't it be NICE to have native Morphic instead?  Think about 
it...having a native Morphic (ie opening a Morph directly in X11/Windows/Mac 
instead of having it chained within Squeak) opens the door to a lot of 
creativity...you could build an external 'toolkit' with that, sure...but the 
power Morphic provides could be quite exciting all by itself.  With all the 
talk of using Squeak for scripting (shell) and stuff, externalizing Morphic 
could create something that rivals Tcl/TK.

I'm no Xlib programmer so I don't know what it would take to do something like 
that...but I start to drool every time I think about it!  I'm not saying that 
we dump the Squeak environment (absolutely not, I quite enjoy it!)...but how 
about something like:  someMorph openInWorld: #external  or something?  THAT 
would be cool.

Regardless...there was some work done on using GTK and Qt widgets from 
Squeak...the subject came up on this list recently and the code is 'out 
there', as they say. (The project was called 'TalkTalk').


> 
> Take a look at Henrik Gedenryd's preliminary anti-aliased font support for Squeak:
> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1231
> This is an example of a relatively minor (compared to native widgets) enhancement
> that improves the look of Squeak way beyond any other "IDE" I've seen. Hopefully, now
> that FreeType2 is officially released, this work can be finished and incorporated into
> the default image.
> 
> Other than fonts, I think much of the new user GUI shock could be fixed with some 
> preference adjustments in the default image.
> 
> 
> Ted Wright	mailto:wright at en.com






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