Hi,
 Things will get a lot nicer looking if you open a Morphic project and 
run within there.  I find morphic fairly pretty.

cheers

bruce

Warren Postma <wpostma at ztr.com> wrote:
> " Introductory Blurb "
> 
> I'll confess my bias right out: I don't like Smalltalk's syntax. [yet.]
> 
> I'm a confirmed C/Delphi/Python bigot! :-)
> 
> My first attempt to learn Smalltalk was in my first year at university, in
> 1989. 
> I got a book on Smalltalk-80 by Adele Goldberg out of the school library. 
> It sure looked neat, but I couldn't find a machine to run it on. 
> 
> Then in 1995, I got VisualAge for OS/2. What a nice package. Having become
> disillusioned with the limitations of C++ classes and templates, I
> immediately grasped the superiority of a "Connectable Parts" metaphor.  My
> boss chose IBM Visual Age C++ instead, though.  Much to our surprise we
> found the templated C++ code it produced was bigger and more bloated, and 5x
> slower than VisualAge for Smalltalk.  And the program took several hours to
> do a full Make.  The company went out of business before their C++
> application was ever finished.
> 
> I had developed some respect for Smalltalk, even if I had no way to use it
> on my PC. 
> 
> So imagine my surprise to find a free Smalltalk. Wow.  
> 
> I'm a computer nostalgia buf. It was charming to boot up Sqeak and see
> something that looked so much like vintage Smalltalk-80. The look was
> reminiscent of the 
> first time I ever used X-Windows on a B/W X-Terminal, and I was also
> reminded of the pictures in the Adele Goldberg book.  I have to hand it to
> the designers, too. On a non-accelerated 640x480 display, with limited color
> depth, the Smalltalk-80 style GUI is a model of efficiency and useability.
> 
> Now I hate to tell any mother that her baby is ugly, but here goes:  On a
> Pentium-II 400 Mhz and 128 mb RAM with a 17" monitor with 1280 x 1024
> resolution and 32 bit color depth, Squeak's windows and widgets are a bit of
> a sore thumb. ;-)
> 
> However, anything that can be built on top of a few powerful patterns, which
> can be combined to build a whole product is very wonderful. Squeak gives the
> overall impression of being fractal; simple input, beautiful results.  
> 
> 
> 
> " Book Recommendations? "
> 
> Anyways, I'm looking for book recommendations, and so on.  I like 500+ page
> tomes.
> Maybe that's not the smalltalk philosophy, or maybe the fragmented nature of
> the various smalltalk vendors precludes a single book being that useful, but
> I'm wondering what y'all think about that.
> 
> If there is nothing Squeak-specific, then at least something that will help
> me get real stuff done in Squeak would be nice.  I like books that build a
> single large application or a useful bunch of related applets.  I would like
> to see some coverage of distributed object systems in Smalltalk as well.  I
> use DCOM heavily right now with Python, Delphi and Visual C++, and I'm
> starting to use XMLRPC/SOAP, and will also need CORBA and RMI in the future.
> 
> 
> Warren Postma
> wpostma at ztr.com