On Fri, 25 Feb 2000 17:04:09 -0500 Paul Fernhout
 <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Here's the typical situation I face right now with Squeak: I'd like to
> make a system that includes an HTML viewer I can give to other people,
> say, related to the Bootstrap Institute http://www.bootsrap.org Open
> Hyperdocument System project. The HTML viewer I see in Squeak looks
> great, but it is in Morphic. So I'm stuck -- because I know I can't give
> that to end users who don't know Squeak. So I can stare wistfully at
> Scamper in the store window, but I can't take it home to make that app.
> I need to duplicate something like Scamper under MVC which takes more
> time than I have. So, I'm more likely to turn to a system that has such
> support in a shippable way. So, all that great work done on Scamper is
> inaccessible to me, and conversely, I'm less likely to go out of my way
> to improve Scamper or make any changes Scamper could use. That's one
> problem with having only an old incomplete GUI and a new experimental
> GUI under Squeak.

Actually, you can display Scamper output in an MVC window. I have a little
InSqueak SwikiBrowser that does so in a rather unsophisticated way, so
forms are a no-no, but the text formmatting works fine.

So ifsimply browsing text and graphics, with links, is your goal, it's
quite doable.

Forms, tables, and the like would be trickier.

I'm happy to send you my stuff if you're interested.

A lot of changes that could/would benefit Scamper lie outside the widget
realm. So improvments of that sort would be benefitial.

One truely great advance from...hm...I forget when...was the pluggable
text, button, and list classes, which work without much modification in
both MVC and Morphic. They aren't *quite* as slick as they *could* be, but
the obvious improvements are, well, obvious ;)

These alone can be used to build quite reasonable and sophisticated
UIs. How sophisticated? Well, at least as sophisticated as the Squeak IDE
stuff, and, frankly, that's pretty sophisticated.

No, it's not Windows or Mac like, but it can grow on one.

And you *can* get rid of the flapping left sided scroll bars...even in
MVC. :)

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.